#50 adding annotations to a djvu document

[Phorminx]

I know that djview is intended to be a viewer for djvu documents. Yet it would be nice if djview also supported to add annotations to a djvu documents, in particular highlighting and textual comments. Any chance to get this added?

There is djvusmooth which allows one to add such annotations to a djvu document, see http://jwilk.net/software/djvusmooth
Yet it is somewhat painful if one has to switch between two different applications for adding annotations and seeing the final result.

Thanks a lot!

[sergey]

( excuse me for my bad English please :-) )
The good example of annotation functionality for PDF is pdf-xchange viewer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF-XChange_Viewer. It will be good if djview will have annotation fucnctionality like this for DjVu files.
Please note that important thing in annotations is that original content is not affected. In other words, it should be possible to add annotation, save, close, reopen file, then delete this annotation. Original content should not be corrupted in this case.
I am believe that DjVu specification allow such things. Wikipedia has very interesting info: version 26 of DjVu file format specification allow text / line annotations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu).

[Havlicek stole the ball]

Any comments by the devs about this?

[Stephen Jones]

Hi.
I am not a developer but I am familiar with some of the more detailed aspects of DjVu. It is possible to add many types of annotations to a DjVu document, including various geometric shapes that can always be visible or made visible when the mouse pointer hovers above their place on the page. You can specify exactly where you want these shapes to appear, and you can have popup comments appear above them. You can highlight various areas that have text or other things in them, and you can choose the colors. You can even change the font colors on a DjVu page. From my experience, all of these changes are based on creating a script (a text file designated with the extension ".dsed") and then combining it with the DjVu file you wish to reversibly modify.
But to do all these things, you must use a command line approach. The program that does these things is called djvused, and it is part of the DjVuLibre project. I wlll briefly give you one example of how this works.
You open a new text file, and add commands needed to create a geometric shape on a page. These commands are described in the DjVuLibre documentation in the djvused section. These commands include the term "maparea" and, for making a rectangle, the "rect" command. You add 4 numbers after the rect command that act as coordinates to position your rectangle on the page. You can also add a border to the rectangle and choose whether it is hidden or always visible. You can also add a comment for a popup comment when the pointer is over the rectangle. Read about this in the documentation.
Most DjVu files one encounters do not have annotations, not because they can't be added, but molre likely because it takes some time to learn how to add them.
If your command line window is working within the DjVuLibre folder, you would type the following to place your saved text (a.dsed) file inside the djvufile a.djvu.

djvused a.djvu -f a.dsed -s

This should place removable annotations within your DjVu file.
To remove the annotations, without altering the original DjVu file, is explained in the documentation and is not difficult. I used to be afraid of command line work, but, once one knows what to type in, it is fairly easy. But all of this does take time to learn and to do.
Leon Bottou sent me a DjVu page that has some examples of annotations on it. You might want to take a look at it. Look for the file in the bugs section of this project, bug #257. The file is an attachment that has the term "antz.djvu" in it.
Hope this helps a bit.
Stephen Jones
Toronto

[Havlicek stole the ball]

you must use a command line approach

That's like asking a blind man to make a painting by telling him when he has to move his hand with the paintbrush up and down, left and right...

[Leon Bottou]

This is not a bad idea, but I do not have the time to do it…

• L.

From: Havlicek stole the ball nospamhere@users.sf.net
Reply-To: "[djvu:feature-requests]" 50@feature-requests.djvu.p.re.sf.net
Date: Tuesday, September 6, 2016 at 3:20 PM
To: "[djvu:feature-requests]" 50@feature-requests.djvu.p.re.sf.net
Subject: [djvu:feature-requests] #50 adding annotations to a djvu document

you must use a command line approach

That's like asking a blind man to make a painting by telling him when he has to move his hand with the paintbrush up and down, left and right...

[feature-requests:#50] adding annotations to a djvu document

Status: open
Group:
Created: Mon Nov 08, 2010 08:45 PM UTC by Phorminx
Last Updated: Tue Oct 06, 2015 08:04 PM UTC
Owner: nobody

I know that djview is intended to be a viewer for djvu documents. Yet it would be nice if djview also supported to add annotations to a djvu documents, in particular highlighting and textual comments. Any chance to get this added?

There is djvusmooth which allows one to add such annotations to a djvu document, see http://jwilk.net/software/djvusmooth
Yet it is somewhat painful if one has to switch between two different applications for adding annotations and seeing the final result.

Thanks a lot!

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[Havlicek stole the ball]

On a sidenote: I read just recently in the Evince mailing-list that their devs are working on adding such functionality.

[Michael]

Don't get your hopes up. They haven't even implemented proper annotation support for pdfs. All they have right now is adding notes. Okular has had far more complete annotation functionality for years.