More positive description of the state of pdf support

[osander]

The pdfcomment documentation reads like you practically cannot use the package without Adobe reader. However, i have spent some time testing pdfcomment with Okular and Evince, and both support annotations quite nicely. Okular shows almost everything; evince not quite. I propose to adjust the wording in the documentation accordingly. I'll attach a patch with a suggestion.

[Josef Kleber]

Well, there isn't something like a little bit pregnant and nice is just the little sister of bull shit. The developers of so called PDF viewers have now tried for more than 10 years to implement something that in fact is able to view PDF files. Without big success! Even if they try - like evince did with text annotations - then they do it again in an ignorant and format violating way. PDF is well defined and an open standard. It doesn't make much sense to implement an arbitrary subset of the format, which is not even published to the users. Sometimes I have the impression that even the developers don't know how much or how good/bad they have implemented parts of the format. I'm really fed up with receiving these "bug reports"! Instead of creating zillions of GUIs based on the same buggy core code (poppler), efforts should be bundled to fully implement PDF. In fact, these so called PDF vierwers are IMHO the worst example of the lack of quality in open source software. Nice wording will not change this mess! Words will follow results!

[osander]

That's an interesting view. Have you actually tried Okular? AFAICT it shows everything in example.pdf except for the last two tooltips, plus you cannot open some notes because the \Rect field is set to zero. My point here is: who will use a free viewer and fix the remaining bugs when the pdfcomment documentation suggests it is not even worth trying?