Saturday, January 25, 2014

How to strike out text in Okular

We just had a user report a wish item in bugs.kde.org asking for Okular to come with a text strike-out annotation by default. I just closed the bug saying that he can create his own annotations by Settings -> Configure Okular -> Annotations -> Add ->
Text Markup -> Strike Out -> Set Color -> OK



Of course we could still ship it, but if you have a look at that "Add Annotations" dialogs there's lots of lots of possibilities so people should just create the ones they see the need for instead of us shipping lots that may not be that useful.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Yes, a user *could* add a new type of annotation, but I think it's unfair to expect a user to know that they could customize the annotations by adding one of their own.

I'm a very experienced user, and I honestly wouldn't think to check the options for a way to create a custom annotation. On the other hand, my thought would be, "oh, strikeout is not present so that's the end of that."

I don't think that a text strikeout annotation is asking too much as it's actually useful to be able to mark another person's pdf with comments and strikeout marks as needed. I remember needing this functionality too in the past. If there is a vote for useful annotations to be included by default, I would say, "yes please for strikeout"!

Unknown said...

This post has been good for me because it's given me the opportunity to discover the flexibility of Okular's annotation system. One thing that I had to do for a client in their accounts receivable department was to create a custom Adobe Acrobat stamp that had the date embedded into the stamp at the time it was "stamped", like,

RECEIVED
25 January 2010

I've been keeping an eye out for equivalent FOSS programs that could do this and I hope that someday Okular could have that functionality, as it would make it easy for me to promote KDE over proprietary solutions. "Look, isn't this great? Okular can do exactly what you need."

Unknown said...

One last thing... as I was investigating creating a custom stamp annotation, it wasn't clear to me that the "Stamp Symbol" is a name of a system icon.

If there were a dialog browser for a system icon, then I'd understand what I could make a stamp. As it is, I have to type a name of an icon and hope I "land" on one. Though because I'm stubborn, I figured out that I could type "ktorrent" and the KTorrent icon would appear as a stamp.

In actuality, I wanted to create a stamp that was a textual stamp, like the word 【 Approved by Michael 】, but apparently those kind are hard-coded into Okular?

Anonymous said...

As Unknown alreay pointed out, I also think the strike out would be worth for having in the default set.

And as the other Unknown said, I also didn't know about the customizable annotation either. Maybe a button in the annotation bar (F6), which would bring up the annotation options could help here? Labeld with the green cross(add), or the wrench (configure).

Brendon Higgins said...

I just had the same idea as Anonymous, above: Adding a button in the annotations bar for "Other"/"New"/"Configure" or somesuch would go a long way to making the extended functionality of Okular's annotations much more discoverable. After all, functionality is only as good as far as the user knows it exists. (And in this case, I sure didn't!)

Anonymous said...

I also vote that "strikeout" be one of the default annotations.

The basic operations in editing text are "add" and "remove".

Currently, all 9(!!) options seem to be for people who are annotating an authoritative document, rather than for people collaborating to write a document.