Denis Auroux - 2009-10-12

Thanks for the suggestions. Many of them are good; let me mention objections / reasons why it is not 100% clear to me that these should be implemented.

- relative file reference: if the PDF and xoj files are in the same directory then you can move them both to a new directory and it will still work (new in version 0.4.5). In more general situations it is not obvious what the right notion of relative path should be in general (symlinks make paths non-unique, so relative paths won't be 100% reliable). Still, there is room for improvement over the current behavior; I can imagine having *both* an absolute and a relative reference and trying them both (in what order?)

- more drawing shapes: remember xournal is primarily designed for handwritten note-taking. I don't want to clutter the interface with a million different kinds of drawing shapes. Rectangles and circles can already be drawn using the shape recognizer, though I agree that it's not easy to get the shape right if you don't have a tablet; so I'll probably have to add them sometime. I could imagine a popup sub-menu of predefined shapes (including lines, rectangles, circles at first) and then adding more shapes would not be a big problem.

- saving annotation in the PDF file: this is not possible given that xournal is NOT a PDF annotator, but rather a journal with PDF features. As far as I know PDF annotation does not allow you to mix and match pages from the PDF and blank pages with handwritten notes on them; inserting/deleting pages from the PDF file would be destructive if using the PDF annotation mechanism. (Also, PDF annotation support is broken in many PDF viewers, and more often than not the annotations won't print properly.). The feasible alternative (I might implement it someday) would be to have the pdf file be contained within the xoj file, then you would have a single file but not in PDF format. Note that you can use "export to PDF" to produce a single PDF file that contains the original document + the annotations (however the annotations won't be editable anymore).

- pressing shift to get horizontal/vertical lines: I don't know any drawing software that does this (certainly not Gimp or Xfig). Tablets don't have a shift key readily available in tablet mode, and I certainly wouldn't have expected shift to do this. There is a patch out there that introduces an "ortho" mode to draw horizontal/vertical lines, I'll look at it carefully and incorporate it in some form in a next release; so there'll definitely be a possibility to do horizontal/vertical lines sometime fairly soon.

Denis