Better annotations

A significant part of my daily work consists of critically reading drafts of publications or project proposals. I usually place hand-written comments on a printout of the respective document and discuss them with the author in my office, but that isn't such a good idea in the time of SARS-CoV-2. We hold these discussions now in video meetings, with the document in question being looked at together by sharing someones screen showing an annotated pdf. Now, I'm using evince to annotate pdfs, and didn't like the fact that all annotations seem to come from ‘Unknown’. In principle, that can be changed by editing the author in the annotation's properties, but I certainly would not have enjoyed doing that for each of the 80+ comments I had made for the present manuscript.

Alas, the official help told me that setting a different default author would not be possible. And that seemed final, since it came from the most authoritative source – the developers themselves. But I finally found a surprisingly simple solution in the place where, at this time, I had expected it least: the ArchWiki.. Shouldn't the developers know that evince looks into /etc/passwd? In any case, a simple

usermod -c “Deus ex machina” cobra

ensured that my comments would be now easily distinguishable from those of the other coauthors.