Comment by mr_mitm
Comment by mr_mitm 2 days ago
You could, though. What you are describing are features of an editor, not a file format. I can imagine a browser addon performing the same tasks.
Comment by mr_mitm 2 days ago
You could, though. What you are describing are features of an editor, not a file format. I can imagine a browser addon performing the same tasks.
PDF is designed for annotations in the file format. You annotate in one editor, you can change the annotations in another. You can always distinguish between original content and annotations. I see no indication that Okular stores highlights or annotations in a separate file, that would be bizarre.
There is no mechanism for annotations in HTML or the other formats I listed. An editor would just be editing the original content in its own non-standardized, non-portable way, which is not desirable for a number of reasons.
So when you say:
> What you are describing are features of an editor, not a file format.
That is incorrect. It is an intentionally designed and standardized feature of the file format.
It definitely used to be bizarre then:
https://superuser.com/questions/333378/where-does-okular-sto...
turns out the default for okular is to save to an external file but there's a setting that can be changed to use the format correctly and store annotations within the file, which is universally compatible with other PDF readers. You can't really blame the format for someone using it wrong on purpose, and if you can then I'll just abuse HTML and the fact that I use it wrong will be evidence that it is, in itself, wrong
But in this case the flexibility of HTML is a negative because any layout shift would mess up the positions of the annotations, so fixing the layout (and making sure it’s non-interactive) is helpful here