Files
pdfcraft/crates/annot
Oliver HagmannandClaude Opus 5.5 4cd646811a M5: drag a line's ends (and a polygon's corners) to change its length and angle
Once drawn, a line or arrow could be moved but not changed: selected, it showed a frame and
no handles, so a wrong length or angle meant drawing it again. A selected line, connected
lines, polygon or cloud now has a handle on each end or corner instead of the frame; dragging
one moves that point (Shift holds it to 45° from the point before), the new shape is drawn
while dragging, and the release is one undo step. The drawing tools keep drawing from an end
(a new line starts there); the Select and Fill & Sign tools pick the handles up.

pdfcraft_annot::set_points sets /L or /Vertices, lets /Rect follow with room for the width
and arrowheads (the rule a new comment is drawn with) and draws the appearance anew;
measurements keep the points they measured, locked comments their shape. Edit::ReshapeAnnotation
("Reshape comment"), comment_edit `points`; the comment list (Summary, DocInfo, comment_list)
carries a line's ends and a polygon's corners.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-20 21:29:14 +02:00
..

pdfcraft-annot

Comments (annotations), ISO 32000-2 §12.5. Layer L3, depends on pdfcraft-cos, pdfcraft-fonts and pdfcraft-model.

What it does

  • Builders for the comment types Acrobat's commenting tools create: sticky note (Text + Popup), highlight, underline, strikethrough, squiggly, rectangle (Square), oval (Circle), line and arrow (Line with /LE), freehand drawing (Ink) and text box (FreeText).
  • Appearance streams (appearance::build) generated from the annotation dictionary, so new and restyled comments look the same in every viewer. Highlights multiply (/BM /Multiply). Note icons are PdfCraft's own drawings. Text boxes use standard Helvetica (WinAnsi), with line breaking by approximate Helvetica proportions (no font program is bundled). Text it can't draw (in a text box, callout, Fill & Sign text, measurement label or dynamic stamp's by-line; appearance::undrawable_text) is kept as typed and drawn as ?, and the comment is marked with the first such character (pdfcraft_fonts::UNDRAWN_MARK) so the engine reports the edit and flattening refuses to make it permanent. Two refusals (AnnotError::Undrawable): a redaction mark's overlay text, which becomes page content when applied; and a restyle or resize of a comment another program drew with a font that has those characters, whose appearance is kept rather than redrawn with ? (new text for it is taken).
  • Edits: reply (/IRT), set review status (a /State reply, as Acrobat's "Set status" does), change text, move, resize, restyle, delete (with pop-up and replies).

API sketch

let index = add_annotation(&mut doc, &NewAnnotation { page, shape, style, contents, author }, &meta)?;
add_reply(&mut doc, page, index, "Agreed", "Ada", &meta)?;
set_review_state(&mut doc, page, index, ReviewState::Accepted, "Ada", &meta)?;
move_annotation(&mut doc, page, index, dx, dy, &meta)?;
set_style(&mut doc, page, index, Some(rgb), Some(0.5), Some(2.0), &meta)?;
delete_annotation(&mut doc, page, index)?;
signature_image(&doc, page, index)?; // embedded image XObject of Fill & Sign signature/initials

A comment is addressed by (page, index in /Annots), the same pair pdfcraft_render::Annotation reports. Meta carries the date and the /NM id so edits stay deterministic; the engine supplies them.

Fidelity rules

  • Unknown keys are kept. Inline annotation dictionaries are promoted to indirect objects only when an edit needs a reference to them.
  • set_style refuses (and changes nothing) when it cannot redraw the comment, e.g. stamps, cloudy borders or callouts, instead of leaving a stale appearance.
  • Replies get the parent's /Rect and an empty appearance: they appear in comment lists but never paint a second icon.
  • Resizing a stamp changes its /Rect and preserves its original appearance and resources; viewers scale that appearance into the new rectangle. Locked stamps refuse the edit.
  • Picture stamps (a natural-size or explicit-rectangle image, a PDF page, or an image signature) and PdfCraft's rubber stamps counterrotate their appearance on rotated pages, so the picture or label reads upright as the page is displayed. Restyling a picture stamp keeps that appearance matrix. The rotation is the page's /Rotate at placement.

Not yet

Callouts, polygons and polylines, clouds, carets (insert/replace text), stamps, file attachments, rich text (/RC, /DS), and the shared named-appearance cache Acrobat writes.