Convert okular-pdf with annotations to normal pdf

Question

I was asked to proofread a dissertation for somebody using only Windows. I use Debian 7 and opened the PDF with okular and commented it heavily.

Everytime I opened the document and then closed it again, the comments were available and it, only at the end, turned out that the comments are not saved to the pdf-File, but rather some obscure and weird external xml lying around somehwere.

My friend for whom I reviewed his work does only have Windows. It's quite confusing reading about this stuff online because it's claimed that okular now supports this, but I couldn't get the installation done

[  0%] Built target okularcore_automoc
[ 24%] Built target okularcore
[ 24%] Built target okularpart_automoc
[ 25%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/okularpart.dir/part.cpp.o
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp: In constructor ‘Okular::Part::Part(QWidget*, QObject*, const QVariantList&, KComponentData)’:
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp:441:19: error: ‘class KMessageWidget’ has no member named ‘setIcon’
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp: At global scope:
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp:929:6: warning: unused parameter ‘column’ [-Wunused-parameter]
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp: In member function ‘Okular::Document::OpenResult Okular::Part::doOpenFile(const Ptr&, const QString&, bool*)’:
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp:1230:66: warning: ‘QString KMimeType::parentMimeType() const’ is deprecated (declared at /usr/include/kmimetype.h:332) [-Wdeprecated-declarations]
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp: In member function ‘virtual bool Okular::Part::openFile()’:
/home/zodiac/Dokumente/franzi/t3/okular/part.cpp:1400:25: error: ‘class KMessageWidget’ has no member named ‘setIcon’
make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/okularpart.dir/part.cpp.o] Fehler 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/okularpart.dir/all] Fehler 2
make: *** [all] Fehler 2

Now, there has to be any way to convert those annotations quickly and without (!) retyping all of them to a format that a Windows-PDF-reader is able to read. I even tried KDE for Windows and exporting it to a document-archive, but on Windows it cannot read the file and crashes. Things like Okular2PDF.jar seem to work... kind of. They put really large comment-icons on the screen, all of which say "The quick brown fox...".

It's really annoying that such a basic feature is implemented in such a terrible and absolutely useless and unintuitive way. Is there any way to EASILY convert the file?

Answer 1

According to the documentation (https://docs.kde.org/stable4/en/kdegraphics/okular/annotations.html):

Since Okular 0.15 you can also save annotations directly into PDF files. This feature is only available if Okular has been built with version 0.20 or later of Poppler rendering library. You can use File → Save As... to save the copy of PDF file with annotations.

I have tried it and worked fine, using Okular 0.23.2 for commenting, and Sumatra PDF 3.0 (on Windows 8.1) for viewing.