Created attachment 148892 [details] Highlighted text annotations but impossible to guess which ones contain notes When proofreading pdf-files a very common pattern is the use of a combination of visual highlighting combined with a pup-up note. The issue is that once the pop-up note is closed - there is no visual clue, that the highlighted text is actually combined with a pop-up note. It would be great if the highlighting itself could contain a visual hint. E.g. in the form of a small semitransparent square or dot at the end of the highlighting. This applies to the following annotations: highlight, underline, squiggle and strike-out. Workaround: point your cursor above an annotation and wait, the note will be displayed as a hint, after a small amount of time. However, this is annoying in cases with many highlighted text pieces, when only some parts are combined with notes. In this case you have to put your cursor above each highlighted text to check for notes. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Highlight text in a document. 2. Point to the highlight marker, right click, choose: "Open pop-up note" - to generate a combined "highlight with note" 3. Write your comment into the pop-up note and close the pop-up window. OBSERVED RESULT There is no visual clue, that the highlighting is combined with a pop-up note. EXPECTED RESULT There should be a visual clue, that the highlighting is combined with a pup-up note. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux Mint 20.03 Okular installed via Flatpak (20.04.1)
I was also bothered by this, and ended up at this issue. Happy to see I'm not the only one ^^ Some ideas for how the visual cue could be done, in decreasing order of my preference: 1. A dotted rectangular outline to the annotated target. (Or: 2. A small notebook/popup icon to the right of the annotated text. 3. User can choose any of the existing _Text markup_ annotation styles, which will be applied automatically to the annotated text if popup text is added. (Not necessarily preferred because of feature bloat.) If the annotation is not a text annotation but, say, a polygon or freehand shape, then the rectangular outline / icon can be placed based on the bounding box of the annotation.
Even worse is that it is quite easy to accidentally create highlights that make it almost impossible to show the annotation, even when you know it exists. I do not understand the details of how it happens, but -I highlight some text in yellow -Then I double click on the yellow highlight, the popup note box appears and I enter some text -Later I double click again on the same yellow text, to read or update the annotatoon text, but an empty popup note appears. After some investigation, it turns out that often new and smaller highlights are being produced that overlap with the desired highlight. They cannot visually be distinguished and it is not clear that more than one highlight exists. The popup text is associated with these small (non deliberately created) highlighted regions instead of the highlighted text. From this point on, the only way to find the annotations is to double click randomly in the yellow region (you cannot tell that this is actually multiple overlapping yellow regions) until you see a non-empty popup window. What I have also done at this point is -when double clicking and finding an empty box, right click in exactly the same location and delete the empty popup note -do that multiple times until all highlights with empty annotations have been removed -the remaining highlight is then usually very small (one character) and not the original highlighted text that I intended to annotate. (And the intended highlight is of course now gone) All of this makes annotations extremely unreliable. The goal of annotations is to inform someone else about how to improve the document. If that someone else uses okular, they will not see the annotations and not even find them easily because random clicking until something appears sometimes requires many trials. In acrobat, the annotations do appear, so I have to advise the reader to use acrobat instead of okular (and I do not want to give such advice). This is with version 24.08.0 on fedora 40.
(In reply to wilfried.philips@wphilips.eu from comment #2) > *snip* When you double-click a highlighted part to add an annotation, which tool do you have selected? If you have the highlighter tool enabled while double-clicking a highlight, and you slightly move your mouse during the double click (e.g. due to imprecision, or perhaps tremors, ticks, etc.), you will actually create a new highlight and immediately edit its annotation. Normally, after you create a highlight, Okular switches from the highlight tool to the browse tool, so that this doesn't happen, but if you reflexively always enable the highlight tool and also don't keep your mouse still while adding annotations, that could very well explain what's going on. (I'm of course not trying to say that *you* are doing something wrong, but just hypothesising about what could be happening.) If that's not the case, or if you're not sure, you could try changing the opacity of your highlighter tool to a lower value. Say, 50% or even 10%. Just temporarily while you investigate. This way, when two highlights overlap, you can immediately recognise it because the overlapping part will be darker. If that doesn't help either, I recommend you open a new bug report (after searching for duplicates), since *this* bug report, while it may be useful for finding the cause of your issue, is of course a separate issue.
(In reply to Florine W. Dekker from comment #3) > (In reply to wilfried.philips@wphilips.eu from comment #2) > > *snip* > > When you double-click a highlighted part to add an annotation, which tool do > you have selected? If you have the highlighter tool enabled while > double-clicking a highlight, and you slightly move your mouse during the > double click (e.g. due to imprecision, or perhaps tremors, ticks, etc.), you > will actually create a new highlight and immediately edit its annotation. > Normally, after you create a highlight, Okular switches from the highlight > tool to the browse tool, so that this doesn't happen, but if you reflexively > always enable the highlight tool and also don't keep your mouse still while > adding annotations, that could very well explain what's going on. (I'm of > course not trying to say that *you* are doing something wrong, but just > hypothesising about what could be happening.) > I changed the transparancy of the annotations to double check the following:: It seems to happen mostly when the annotation tool remains selected instead of going to browsing mode. (But this is the way of working that is least cumbersome...) So your analysis is probably correct. > If that's not the case, or if you're not sure, you could try changing the > opacity of your highlighter tool to a lower value. Say, 50% or even 10%. > Just temporarily while you investigate. This way, when two highlights > overlap, you can immediately recognise it because the overlapping part will > be darker. It helps, but even then knowing where to click is tricky. I have noticed a few cases where I see a larger annotated area (correct one) and then a smaller one (created accidentally) where the annotation is sometimes attached to the large one, sometimes the small one. A visual indication (as requested in this ticket) would be essential and preferably these would be editable by a simple double click (like now, except that people would have an indication on where to click). I think the overly sensitive mouse issue should also be solved so as to avoid having to switch between annotation and browse mode: when clicking occurs in a yellow area do not create a new annotation but use the one under the cursor. This is of course a different issue than in this ticket. > > If that doesn't help either, I recommend you open a new bug report (after > searching for duplicates), since *this* bug report, while it may be useful > for finding the cause of your issue, is of course a separate issue. Sure, I understand that.