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 ofcourse.

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

  • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
    6·
    3 years ago

    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.

      • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        The problem are auto-upgrades.

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

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
          2·
          3 years ago

          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.

          • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
            2·
            3 years ago

            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.

            • Ephera@lemmy.ml
              1·
              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.

    • quiteStraightEdge@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      3 years ago

      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)

            • quiteStraightEdge@lemmy.mlOP
              2·
              3 years ago

              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

                • quiteStraightEdge@lemmy.mlOP
                  2·
                  3 years ago

                  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 :)

    • Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
      1·
      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.

  • Helix@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • quiteStraightEdge@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      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.