this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2021
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Hello!

In the age of remote learning/teaching I started using Edge to draw in .pdfs I'm showing to my students and it really fits my basic need, but something more focused on the task and in spirit of FLOSS would great. What's most important to me is ability to draw and easily erase what I drawn; handy page switching. More would be nice of course.

I couldn't find anything like that, and software like Krita or GIMP doesn't work well for my needs, that's why I'm using Edge.

If you know anything like that please tell! ^^

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Xournal++ is a nice tool for that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

I am not sure how is the drawing thing, but if it is like "underlining things", selecting, put them in a circle, etc, you could try Okular which is in the Windows Store (must be installed per Windows user as UWP apps are installed in each user independently).

Okular is in main repositories of most distributions too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

You can also grab a build from KDE's build server, if you don't want to use the Windows Store.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

The problem are auto-upgrades.

Would be preferable using a GNU/Linux system if wanted to avoid Woe shit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Obviously, Linux would be better for avoiding Microsoft, yeah, but if that's not preferable for other reasons, then Windows without a Microsoft account is still massively better than Windows with it.

And honestly, I don't feel like auto-upgrades are that important in a niche PDF reader. The chance that someone targets Windows malware against Okular or libpoppler is pretty much 0. So, just grabbing a new version every year or so, is probably fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

The thing was not specific vulnerabilities but improvements and fixes.

There could be some performance issues in some documents, crash under undetermined conditions and ofc general vulnerabilities not dependent on this tool could be taken into account.

Okular is not just document-library + own code. There are other libraries involved and Qt is a big framework with wide use and surface.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

Yeah, alright, Qt is a fair point. That might actually get targeted by an attacker.

Personally, I would still deem a Microsoft account a bigger security risk than only updating Qt every few months (if you set yourself a reminder to e.g. grab the newest version every 3 months).

But yeah, that's where it starts to become subjective and not something one can give as general advice.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 years ago

I use Xournal++ for all of my teaching.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

Libre office draw can be used for this purpose

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

Hm, I made a few pdfs' in it... There is an option to open documents and draw in them?

Also Artix ftw! (I think, I didn't make through installation yet, haha)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

due to powercut many pksgs broke , so now returned to arch

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

That's so unlucky... I guess I will have to get new UPS. Current one works only when system is idle, or for my laptop :p

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

I guess btrfs is good interm of data protection

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Yeah. It's has some cool features for doing snapshots? I wanted to setup Artix on it, but failed with base installation iso, so I went with gtk one and basic settings to get it running asap. I read than ext4 is more stable than btrfs? Or that it just has some issues, so I stayed with ext4. As a backup/sync thing I would recommend running LAN only instance of Nextcloud or use Syncthing. It won't prevent your system from dying, but getting back up and running should be quite fast and convinient :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

I guess fedora also using btrfs . I can't get next cloud :(

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

I think I read that ext4 is more stable than btrfs especially with power failures. If you like to play with btrfs though you could try Garuda Linux, which is Arch + btrfs and comes default with roll back options from Grub menu. Looks very slick, it (I tried their KDE and a few other flavors) was not so stable on my hardware but has some nice options like Libredragon by default with local Whoogle and Searx pre defined.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

The problem is how a lot of PDFs are structured. With a lot of them you would find design issues if you open them with an editor in order to modify them like if was just a vectorized image.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Thank you all for replies. I will check every proposition you made and leave a comment which one I picked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

If you want to do this to use it as a virtual whiteboard and/or teach remotely, you can use OpenBoard.

[A]n open source cross-platform interactive white board application designed primarily for use in schools. It was originally forked from Open-Sankoré, which was itself based on Uniboard.

Otherwise, xournal++ as suggested by @drop is what I use for PDF annotation. You can use a tablet like the Huion H420 or Gaomon S620 for precise input on Windows or Linux.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

I got Wacom Intuos few years ago as present. So now while I'm explaining something I can draw whatever I need in the moment, to get the idea through.