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1. Issue

The text markup in Okular is not persistent. The yellow marker disappears just after I have swept the cursor over the text to highlight.

However, the file is marked as having been edited and needing to be saved. After saving no marker shows up. Ditto if I close and reopen the file. So mark-up may well exist but is not visible.

Same story for lines, other annotations, and inline and pop-up notes. The various stamps work fine though.

2. Ubuntu versions for which Okular does not work

I noticed this behaviour since the installation of Ubuntu 18.04 and

  • Okular 1.3.3 installed by apt from the standard repository
  • Additional libraries according to Okular's own help: KDE Frameworks 5.44.0, Qt 5.9.5 (built against 5.9.5), the xcb windowing system.

and also of Ubuntu 20.04 with

  • Okular 1.9.3 installed by apt from the standard repository
  • Additional libraries according to Okular's own help: KDE Frameworks 5.68.0, Qt 5.12.8 (built against 5.12.8), the xcb windowing system.

So there's been upgrades between Ubuntu 18 and 20, but this is still an issue.

Attempts to install a few more packages

Attempts to install a few more packages serving or extending Okular did not work. I used Synaptic to have view of Okular-related extension and installing okular-dev and okular-mobile did not fix the issue. Likewise, for good measure out of sheer intuition, I also installed libpoppler-{cpp-dev|glib-dev|-private-dev} but these did not make any magic either.

I started Okular from the command line and saw whether it threw error messages. I spotted none that I myself could link to this issue.

3. Ubuntu versions for which Okular did work

Everything was alright with Ubuntu 16.04 and its Okular 0.24.2 distributed in the standard repository. The libraries Okular depends on in Ubuntu 16 differ remarkably from those used in Ubuntu 18/20.

  • Then I have scribbled a PDF document with Okular Ubuntu 20 and viewed it with the Okular of Ubuntu 16. In Ubuntu 16 I can only see the same annotations that I could see in Ubuntu 20. Apparently, what did not persist when viewing Ubuntu 20 has not actually been saved in the document.

  • Conversely, I have scribbled a PDF document with Okular of Ubuntu 16 and viewed it with the Okular of Ubuntu 20. In Ubuntu 20 I can see the annotations that I could see in Ubuntu 16. So these do persist.

  • Finally, the annotation that persisted in Okular of Ubuntu 20 and could be viewed by Okular of Ubuntu 16, disappear if I view the document in Ubuntu 20 once again. That is, what I could add and view in Ubuntu 20 is not visible in Ubuntu 20 any longer if I saved that document in Ubuntu 16 in the meantime. That is, I only see the annotations added with Ubuntu 16 and nothing at all of those added by Ubuntu 20.

4. Research

There is another post of 2017 where the opposite problem occurred: the text disappeared. See Okular: Text disappears after it has been highlighted, with Ubuntu 16.

I have also asked in the KDE forum to no avail up to now: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=251&t=166734

5. Questions

Advice and tips how to get Okular to show and save highlighting and mark-ups in Ubuntu 18 and 20 are gratefully appreciated.

XavierStuvw
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  • Consider using xournal, it seems to work better. A possible disadvantage is that the markups are kept in a separate file from the pdf. – Organic Marble Feb 24 '20 at 16:48
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    @OrganicMarble I will have a look at that, thanks for the tip, but at this moment I need to stick to Okular for compatibiliy/ease of use across different computers and distros. – XavierStuvw Feb 24 '20 at 20:25

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