Nearly 10 years ago, I first looked into this for Evince but quickly gave up. One year and a half ago, I tried again, this time in Papers. After several merge requests in poppler and in Papers, ink and free text annotations support just landed in Papers repository!

Therefore, it is now possible to draw on documents and add text, for instance to fill forms. Here is a screenshot with the different tools:

This is the result of the joint work of several people who designed, developed, and tested all the little details. It required adding support for ink and free text annotations in the GLib bindings of poppler, then adding support for highlight ink annotations there. Then several things got in the way adding those in Papers; among other things, it became clear that an undo/redo mechanism was necessary and annotations management was entangled with the main view widget. It was also an opportunity to improve document forms, which are now more accessible.

This can be tested directly from the GNOME Nightly flatpak repository and new issues are welcomed.

Also, this is a new blog and I never quite introduced myself: I actually started developing with GTK on GTK 2, at a time when GTK 3 was looming. Then I took a long break and delved again into desktop development two years ago. Features that just got merged were, in fact, my first contributions to Papers. They are also the ones that took the most time to be merged! I became one of Papers maintainers last March, joining Pablo (who welcomed me in this community and stopped maintenance since then), Markus, and Qiu.

Next time, a post about our participation in Outreachy with Malika's internship !