pdfcomment and Evince

Question

I was using pdfcomment to generate annotations in PDF files. But when I try to view the output PDF in Evince the annotations appear as a weird symbol that is not clickable:

Any suggestions for fixing the problem? I am using Evince 3.4.0 with Poppler 0.18. I tried viewing other PDFs with annotations in Evince and those seem to be fine, so I think it might be a pdfcomment issue.

Here is an example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pdfcomment}

\begin{document}
\pdfcomment{hello}world                                                                                                                                                                                            
\end{document}

The generated pdf looks just like the screenshot above.

Answer 1

According to the pdfcomment author, this problem was due to Evince not following the PDF Reference on annotations. Evince seems to have a problem with the zero width that pdfcomment specifies for its annotations.

See also bug 685334 (Fixed on June, 2015 and available since Evince 3.18).

A workaround could be to directly use the \pdfannot command. I use this:

\makeatletter
\newcommand{\annotate}[2][]{%
\pdfstringdef\x@title{#1}%
\edef\r{\string\r}%
\pdfstringdef\x@contents{#2}%
\pdfannot
width 2\baselineskip
height 2\baselineskip
depth 0pt
{
/Subtype /Text
/T (\x@title)
/Contents (\x@contents)
}%
}
\makeatother

(copied from here)

Answer 2

That bug is already fixed in current versions of Evince and Okular.