[texworks] Commenting pdfs?

[Paul A Norman]

Dear Steffan,

>>"* It's would essentially work around a deficiency of the poppler library
(but I don't know enough about their internals to submit a patch to the
poppler people)."

If poppler could be got to recognise (if not create) such comments in
a pdf  (made outside poppler by a 3rd party?) - could it be asked to
pass such comments back to into TeXWorks (as %comments themselves) in
much the same way as it can reposition us in the TeXWorks editor, or
would having coments added outside itself ruin the validity of the
reposition information stored in the file that is generated when
TeXWorks calls for the pdf to be made?

If it was achievable for stored comments in a pdf to be passed back -
would it also open the door to sending plain text from the poppler
interface back into the source TeXWorks document in realtime?

E.g. A popup box could be made to appear with an input control and a
button to send text back to TexWorks editor from a given location in
the poppler interface?

I sense that this last suggestion may be more readily achievable, even
if processing user made pdf comments is more difficult.

It seems to me that haveing a mechanism to retuen the comments to
TexWorks editor would be for collaboration projects - what would make
such a feature a killer - pass the pdf arround a group, and then put
it back in the project directory - open the prioject and call for
agreed markup to go back into the editor before the pdf is re-made.

You've certainly raised the issue sof how TeXWorks can be used for
groups projects in a wider sense in  a more WYSIWYG fashion.

Paul

2010/1/9 Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> this is a call for comments.
>
> I recently found out that it may be possible to add comments to pdf
> documents without going through poppler (which currently doesn't support
> this feature). What I'd like to know now is if this is a feature the
> community would like.
>
> Here are a few pros/cons to get the discussion started:
> Pros:
> * Facilitates cooperation
> * There are few to none apps on Linux that support this
>
> Cons:
> * This would be a pdf-viewer-only feature. There's no way to keep such
> comments between runs of latex, for example. As such, it's not really a
> feature expected of a TeX editor. Equivalently, there a numerous other
> apps out there (at least on Windows, I don't know about Mac) that
> provide this feature.
> * It's would essentially work around a deficiency of the poppler library
> (but I don't know enough about their internals to submit a patch to the
> poppler people).
> * It would be a rather simplistic approach - just adding comments (and
> perhaps, one day, modifying/deleting them as well). No fancy
> strike-outs, markups and the like for the time being.
>
> What do you think? Killer-feature or absolute waste of time?
> -Stefan
>