Okular highlights are not Gmail compatible (highlights are not visible in Gmail).

Please help!


Software developer considers it a Gmail problem.

However, the problem does not exist for other PDF readers/editors so Gmail does not consider it a Gmail problem.


I like Okular but the only way around this problem is to print to pdf the highlighted pdf to make another pdf (then that one will be visible in Gmail).

Since there appears to be no belief/interest in fixing Okular, perhaps there is other software or solutions recommended?


Thank you!

Linux has a number of .pdf readers. I don't know what distro or desktop environment you're using (presumably KDE) so it's hard to say what is in the repos, but you should be able to use your package manager to search for pdf readers, and install whichever you like, or all of them, and try them out. Dependencies will get pulled in, but shouldn't be really huge.

I've been using Okular for a heck of a long time and you've stumped me.

What are "Okular highlights"?


Update: If the OP was referring to the highlighting you can do to a PDF when the "Review" checkbox is selected in Okular... that works fine. Just tested it.

First of all, it took me a while to realise that you are probably talking about some google cloud online text/pdf editor, and not Gmail itself.

PDF is not a fixed standard, there's various implementations/extensions/interpretations ... in other words, it's a hot mess.
Linux developers are ususally interested in adhering to what the big players think is a valid interpretation of that mess, but that doesn't mean that Google is "right" and Okular is "wrong".

It wouldn't be the first time that Google force their erroneous interpretation on everybody, and everybody has to work with the quirks Google introduced...

So, without knowing more about this "bug" and Okular devs apparent refusal to "fix" it, ....

I recommend refering to Okular as the gold standard and use less multinational corporation online editing tools.

Anyone wanting to guarantee portability should be saving as PDF/A, which is a subset of the PDF specification specifically designed to ensure documents render identically in any software.

Validation of PDF/A files can be done with VeraPDF: https://openpreservation.org/products/verapdf/