I realize that this is unlikely to be a Gentoo-specific problem, but regardless I'd like to know where to start looking for a solution. On Kubuntu, Okular 0.24.2 has a feature called "Trim margins" in the "View" menu. In my installation of Gentoo, there is simply no such entry in the same menu in Okular 15.08.3-r1. For the reference, I have poppler-0.32.0 on Gentoo and poppler 0.41.0-0ubuntu1 on Kubuntu, but I've been told that this feature is present with poppler 0.24.5-2ubuntu4.3.
I see "View" -> "Trim View" -> "Trim Margins" - is that the option?
Created attachment 434014 [details] screenshot I don't have that one. See the screenshot.
I wasn't able to find anything in the okular code that might make it conditional. Could you please try with English selected in case it's an issue with our translation handling, and failing that with a new user?
- Switching to English didn't work; - Creating a new user and running Okular from there DID work. By trial and error, I established that the culprit is the file at ~/.kde4/share/apps/okular/part.rc. It contained the line <Action name="view_trim_mode"/> Changing it to <Action name="view_trim_margins"/> solved the problem. I wonder how it could contain a wrong menu item identifier in the first place.
Since it worked with a new user, your change should be wrong, actually. Because that's how the part.rc file would look like there. Did you run a diff between your old and your new user's part.rc?