I opened a long PDF in Okular today, searched for a phrase, added a note, and then printed three selected pages. The first three actions worked well. The printer produced pages two through four instead of the pages I thought I had selected.

My naive response was to repeat the job with different numbers. That merely consumed more paper, proving that printers remain the most effective mechanism for converting uncertainty into physical objects.

The confusion came from document page labels not matching the PDF’s internal page sequence. The introduction uses roman numerals, while the print dialog expects physical page positions. Okular displays both pieces of information in different contexts, but the distinction is too easy to miss when acting quickly.

As a viewer, Okular is already a substantial improvement over keeping separate programs for PDF and other document types. Search, text selection and navigation feel consistent because the shell supplies them while backends handle formats. That mechanism also exposes limitations: a backend may render well but lack annotations, forms or reliable printing details.

Annotations are useful, but I would not treat them as safely embedded in every source document without checking how that format stores them. Exporting or sharing a marked document deserves a test copy first.

My practical conclusion is to verify page labels in print preview and keep original documents untouched until annotation behavior is clear. Okular has become my default viewer, but “default” does not mean “incapable of surprising me.” That title remains permanently reserved for printing.