feature open annotation
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#197 feature open annotation
There is a comprehensive annotation w3c standard that seems to be emerging.
It would be worth and investigation and a vision in that direction.
http://www.openannotation.org/
It allows annotations to be standardized, interoperable, and possibly usable over different file-types, also posssibly between fixed-page and free-flow documents.
As far as I can tell this is very different from what xournal cares about, and much too complicated to be useful for us. In any case it's not a xournal bug, so I'm redirecting this to feature-requests (and have no intention to implement this feature anytime soon).
Denis
Ticket moved from /p/xournal/bugs/145/
I understand, and by no means I assume any doable/fixable in a short term.
I think there is potential lies if xournal could save/edit annotation of
pdfs specified by one URL on a webserver,
and annotation-file in another URL on webdav.
As of now, xoj files are a sort of notebook/annotation format in themselves but
there as of yet there no universal standard.
Also there is a necessity to manage xojs in tandem with pdfs on a local-machine.
I hope that the feature-req/issue/bug is visible to see what perspectives it gathers over time.
Honestly, a w3c standard doesn't help for this -- what's needed is
support for URLs instead of file names in loading/saving and in the xoj
file format. The first part (looking for a PDF in a URL specified in
the xoj file) should be an easy modification. The second part is a
matter of whether the GTK open/save dialog boxes can handle webdav
resources and whether you have write access. Besides, many xournal files
do not contain annotations -- most are standalone handwritten documents;
writing on top of a PDF is just one use case.
No, xoj is not a notebook/annotation format. It's a format for storing
some specific types of vector graphics elements, a bit similar
conceptually to a very small subset of either PDF or SVG, but with its
own quirks (compared to SVG, the main differences are the emphasis on
the notion of page and external references to page backgrounds -- and of
course the much more limited set of features).
Concretely, a .xoj contains info about page background styles, a lot of
polygonal lines, and occasionally a few text items or bitmap images, all
laid out on pages. A notebook/annotation file would focus a lot more on
the logical structure of the content and its interrelationship with the
content being annotated, rather than the details of the actual graphical
elements representing the content -- it's a very different form of
representation and not what xournal does.
One could try to extend xoj to move the format into either direction (a
full-featured vector graphics format, or a general annotation format),
but in my opinion that'd be a major mistake. If you want a general
vector graphics editor that handles all of the SVG format, that already
exists -- it's inkscape. It's a lot more powerful but a lot more
difficult to use than xournal. If you want a general annotation editor,
I'm sure that exists already or will exist soon and it'll also look very
different from xournal -- the scope is much broader in terms of types of
documents that can be annotated, how the logical structure is handled,
etc.
Perhaps OneNote qualifies as an annotation editor (I haven't seen it in
over 10 years and don't remember what it does exactly) -- that's a very
useful thing to have, but it's well beyond the scope of xournal and I
don't have the courage to try to write such a complicated piece of software.
Denis