1

Right now it's not possible to export the comments added to key images. This is a pretty severe limitation that needs to be addressed.

It's the third or fourth time that I look into this. In an older version there was a function to export to PDF but this doesn't work, we want full flexibility in the output for the user to further edit the content, add their own logo and formatting, etc. So it should export to a Word or Writer document. The problem is that there is no lightweight library to export to these formats.

But this really needs fixing so I'm going to try a different approach. I will export to Markdown, a simple text-based format, and then I'll use Pandoc which is a separate open source software that can convert between Markdown and Word, Writer, PDF, etc.

The Pandoc binary itself is several times larger than Kinovea so I can't justify adding this directly into the program. I can see two approaches:

1. The user installs a Kinovea "plugin" that contains Pandoc and the code to call it.
2. The user installs Pandoc themselves separately and Kinovea figures out where it's installed and the code to call it is builtin.

Both require the user to install a separate thing so I might as well simplify things and just tap into an existing installation instead of wrapping a third party program into a plugin.

I haven't tried any of this yet but I'm pretty convinced the Markdown + converter makes the most sense at this point. I'm hoping this will allow the use of templates so we can generate nice reports directly.

Any thoughts or comment about this are more than welcomed.

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Option 2 is good, but I would recommend using LibreOffice https://www.libreoffice.org/ instead of Pandoc as it can open Markdown files and save as Doc, PDF etc. But it also has spreadsheet, database, and presentation modules so would be a useful companion App for  Kinovea.