Frequently Asked Questions

Questions

Compiling Okular

• The Poppler backend does not compile. It complains about 'class Poppler::TextBox' and 'edge'.

Running Okular

• Okular tells me there are no plugins installed. What can I do?

General usage

• Why the newly added annotations are not in my PDF document?
• How can I annotate a document and send it to a friend/colleague/etc?
• Using Ubuntu, I cannot read CHM and EPub documents, even if I have okular-extra-backends and libchm1 installed. Why?
• Why the speak options in the Tools menu are grayed out?
• Some characters are not rendered and when enabling debug some lines mention 'Missing language pack for xxx'

Answers

Compiling Okular

The Poppler backend does not compile. It complains about 'class Poppler::TextBox' and 'edge'.

Do you get an error output similar to

Building CXX object okular/generators/poppler/CMakeFiles/okularGenerator_poppler.dir/generator_pdf.o
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp: In member function 'Okular::TextPage* PDFGenerator::abstractTextPage(const QList<Poppler::TextBox*>&, double, double, int)';:
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1088: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1091: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1098: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1101: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1113: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1115: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1122: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1125: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1134: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1136: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1144: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1147: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1158: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1160: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1167: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
[...]/kdegraphics/okular/generators/poppler/generator_pdf.cpp:1170: error: 'class Poppler::TextBox'; has no member named 'edge';
make[2]: *** [okular/generators/poppler/CMakeFiles/okularGenerator_poppler.dir/generator_pdf.cpp.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [okular/generators/poppler/CMakeFiles/okularGenerator_poppler.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

If so, most probably you updated from Poppler 0.6.x or previous to Poppler 0.8.
What you can do is simple:

rm CMakeCache.txt

in the build directory of Okular. Then run cmake again, and all should work as expected.

[Up to Questions]

Running Okular

Okular tells me there are no plugins installed. What can I do?

In a shell set up for your KDE 4 installation, execute the command

kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

After that, Okular should find its plugins as expected.

[Up to Questions]

General usage

Why the newly added annotations are not in my PDF document?

By default, Okular saves annotations in the local data directory for each user. Since KDE 4.9, it's optionally possible to store them directly in a PDF file by choosing "File -> Save As...", so they can be seen in other PDF viewers.
Note that this feature requires Poppler 0.20 or newer for regular PDF documents. If the PDF document you are annotating is encrypted, this feature requires Poppler 0.22 or newer.

[Up to Questions]

How can I annotate a document and send it to a friend/colleague/etc?

Since KDE 4.2, Okular has the "document archiving" feature. This is an Okular-specific format for carrying the document plus various metadata related to it (currently only annotations).
You can save a "document archive" from the open document by choosing "File -> Export As -> Document Archive".
To open an Okular document archive, just open it with Okular as it would be eg a PDF document.

If you're annotating a PDF document, you can also save annotations directly in the PDF file (see previous question)

[Up to Questions]

Using Ubuntu, I cannot read CHM and EPub documents, even if I have okular-extra-backends and libchm1 installed. Why?

Ubuntu (thus Kubuntu as well) packages of Okular are compiled without the support for these two formats.

The reason is explained in the following Launchpad report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kdegraphics/+bug/277007 .

[Up to Questions]

Why the speak options in the Tools menu are grayed out?

Because you don't have a speech service on your system, install the Qt Speech library and they should be enabled

[Up to Questions]

Some characters are not rendered and when enabling debug some lines mention 'Missing language pack for xxx'

Install the poppler-data package

[Up to Questions]

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