SUMMARY Some people wish Okular could save annotations in a separate XML file instead of inside the PDF document, which is a feature which will not come back. But it may be useful to be able to export all annotations, to import them in another document. USE CASE 1. Write a lecture script and deploy it as PDF to your students 2. Students are annotating the script with their questions 3. Students send back a lot of annotated PDFs 4. Open each PDF, copy all annotations, paste them in your own PDF 5. Be well prepared for your next lesson :) CURRENT STATE You have to keep all PDFs of each single student, because each contains a single question. You need to switch tabs frequently. EXPECTED STATE You have all questions in one PDF, so you can comfortably go trough them. RELATED following features should be implemented to make this feature easy to use Bug: 197726 Show annotation comment text in the annotations side panel D21364: Indicate annotation type by icon in the annotations side panel D21376: For highlight annotations, show highlighted text in the annotations side panel Order annotations by y-position on the page. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION I suggested this already in Bug: 394775, because its reporters might have an opinion on this.
Honestly, it seems like the "i have a hammer everything i see are nails" problem. You should just find a better way to ask your students than via a PDF file and annotations.
Yeah I kind of have to agree with Albert here. Your workflow is clever, but seems like it's trying to force Annotations into something it's not really designed to do. Seems like you might be better served using a collaborative document program like LibreOffice online (or Google docs...) and having your students use the Track Changes feature to add comments and annotations.
*** Bug 427474 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The two phabricator diffs mentioned in the first post look interesting in their own right. David, can I motivate you to submit them as gitlab merge requests (and maybe even adopt them wholesale)?