[evince] Annotation and evince

[Anne Vanhoest <a vanhoest ucl ac uk>]

Hello,

First obviously I thank you sincerely for the work you are putting into
the development of evince.

Second, as a scientist I get through a lot of pdfs so every now and again
I check on the progress of annotations in evince.
One point that only came to my attention now, is whether to save the
annotation with the pdf, or in a separate file.  I would be a very very
strong advocate of offering at least the option of keeping the annotation
separate from the file.  I have absolutely no idea how I came to this
understanding, but it seemed (to me) that there were discussions to embed
the annotation with the pdf, and that this would be more difficult than
keeping them in a separate file. Of course the main point here is whether
it would be easier (in which case yeahhh) or more difficult (in which
case you may just skip the end of this email) to implement separate
annotation and pdf files, but I can think of many further
reasons for the separation of pdf and annotations, some of which are:
For most internal reports, I am not the only person reading those
pdfs, and sometimes I very much want my comments to remain private.
The same goes when reading a paper from our pdf database, I must either
keep local copies of all papers I have read (with the increased
complication that I work on a number of different pcs), or have the
annotations saved separately (on the pdf server).  Upon opening the pdf
using evince, the reader could be offered to overlay the annotation (from
one or more files) or start with a "clean" paper.
Multiple annotation files would also make collaboration easier.  This is
probably only relevant for people like me who do not use word but latex to
produce documents. Ho, and I also think that my teaching would benefit
from distinct annotations files.
Sure enough keeping separate files will increase the complexity in some
ways (eg what happens when one file is moved), but the more I think about
it the more reasons I find in favour of separate files.  And as long as
evince is somehow "aware" of the existence of those annotation files, it
would be nearly seamless for the users.

Of course, it's always easy to ask and again I already thank you for the
development evince.

Many thanks

And if you enjoy this time of the year, have a happy Xmas.

anne






###########################################

anne Vanhoest

Implanted Devices Group

Medical Physics and Bioengineering Department
Malet Place Engineering Building
UCL

Gower Street
WC1E 6BT London

phone: 020 7679 0296 (internal: 30296)
fax: 020 7679 0255