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Comment by tonydiep | Hacker News Reader

I just evaluated Evince, Okular, Foxit, and Acrobat for annotating PDFs.

My particular use case is to annotate emails, spreadsheet, etc., and merge them as exhibits into a legal brief.

After annotation, the other programs can export the original or it export the annotation layers but it could not give you a PDF with both the original and the annotations merged into one layer. This was a deal breaker.

With Okular you can print the PDF with the annotations as a new PDF to make sure your annotations are always visible. With the other programs the annotations are on separate layers which can get hidden on purpose or by mistake.

I found no other free program that could flatten the layers.

Okular deserves to be better known.

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> Okular deserves to be better known.

s/Okular/most KDE software/

In theory, shouldn't every PDF viewer support printing... and both macOS and Windows 10 support printing to PDF... which flattens the layers?

Just tried it with macOS Preview and totally flattens it, the annotations pane lists nothing, I can't select/move annotations... they're permanent.

However, also just tried with Acrobat Reader on macOS, and infuriatingly after selecting the system's "Print to PDF" Acrobat pops up an error saying it doesn't support print to PDF. WTF. Why would they intentionally go out of their way to disable that?

Because they sell PDF creation tools: https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat.html?promoid=C12Y324...

> Why would they intentionally go out of their way to disable that?

I hope that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486SX is a not-excessively-snarky reply by appeal to history.

Try CUPS-PDF. I don't know if it still works but I've used it in the past to save PDFs from programs that stubbornly refused to allow it.

https://www.cups-pdf.de/

I just tried in Evince and you can print an annotated document to flatten it just fine.

Can you show me how?

I'm using Document Viewer aka Evince 3.28.2 on CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core) and I don't see an option to print the PDF with annotations.

It's just the normal print option. Fill out the form, Save As with the form filled out (not sure if this is necessary), print in the main menu

Have you found any software for exporting annotations (especially highlighted text)? Ideally, I would want to highlight text, select graphics, and have the software let me export those to PDF or doc/odf. My use case is reviewing academic papers.

I looked into Xodo and Foxit, but they don't offer what I need.

Have you tried Zotero with the Zotfile extension?

xournal does this.

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