Okular 20.08 — redesigned annotation tools

Last year I wrote about some enhancements made to Okular’s annotation tool and in one of those, Simone Gaiarin commented that he was working on redesigning the Annotation toolbar altogether. I was quite interested and was also thinking of ‘modernizing’ the tool — only, I had no idea how much work it would be. The existing annotation tool works, but it had some quirks and had many advanced options which were documented pretty well in the Handbook but not obvious to an unscrupulous user. For instance, if the user would like to highlight some part of the text, she selects (single-clicks) the highlighter tool, applies it to a block of text. When another part of text is to be highlighted, you’d expect the highlighter tool to apply directly; but it didn’t ‘stick’ — tool was unselected after highlighting the first block of text. There is an easy way to make the annotation tool ‘stick’ — instead of single-click to select the tool, simply double-click, and it persists. Another instance is the ‘Strikeout’ annotation which is not displayed by default, but can be added to the tools list. Simone, with lots of inputs, testing and reviews from David Hurka, Nate Graham and Albert Astals Cid et al., has pulled off a magnificent rewrite of Okular’s annotation toolbar. To get an idea of the amount of work went into this, see this phabricator task and this invent code review. The result of many months of hardwork is a truly modern, easy to explore-and-use annotation support. I am not aware of any other libre PDF reader with such good annotation features.

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Now and Then: The Fate of 7 Promising Free Linux Web Browsers

This is illustrated by the image to the left which depicts the web browser share for visits to LinuxLinks.com for the period covering June – September 2020. But Chrome and Firefox are not for everyone. Chrome is proprietary software so it’s not very appealing to open source enthusiasts. There’s the open source Chromium, of course, but that’s not very popular. And Firefox has been steadily losing market share.