annotation with gimp

[Steve Litt]

Is it my imagination, or has this discussion taken place in the absense
of a definition of the word "annotate?" Is a stylus necessary? Is the
material to be annotated already a PDF? For what purpose is it being
"annotated", does it go in a browser, and are there extra points for
the annotations to be animated (run a procedure or change colors when
hovered or clicked)?

Gimp's perfectly capable of adding text and lines and the like to any
jpg/png/bmp, and Gimp's capable of importing a page of a PDF. From
there, marking it up is just a matter of creating a layer on top of the
original image, perhaps a layer that's somewhat transparent, and doing
your work there. The only problem with using Gimp to alter is the
problem with Gimp in general: Slow and a lot of work.

Personally, I use Inkscape for alteration. Layers, objects that can
be moved around without hurting the original. Plus, for extra credit,
you can "annotate" it in Inkscape to the point where hovering or
clicking or leaving an image part can run a procedure. 

The one problem with Inkscape is that sometimes, when viewed with
certain viewers, the text you type in can expand to overwrite your
balloons. This can be fixed by converting text to curves, although
obviously I suggest this only at the end of the project.

Inkscape has all the transparency and layer chops to do this job
efficiently and well, and is a great choice when you want to add vector
graphic content (which is easy) to existing raster graphic content.

Directly altering PDF files is a lot like making a program change by
messing with the object code instead of changing the source code. It
can be quick and easy, but do it long enough and you're going to run
into unescapable trouble.


On Wed, 11 Oct 2017 10:21:05 -0700
Ed <plug at 0x1b.com> wrote:

> To annotate a PDF look at Xounal
> http://xournal.sourceforge.net/
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 9:34 AM, Brian Cluff <brian at snaptek.com>
> wrote:
> > Try using okular, KDE's PDF viewer, to annotate PDFs.  I won't do
> > it in gimp.  It not really the tool for the job.
> >
> > Brian Cluff
> >
> > On 10/10/2017 11:39 PM, Michael wrote:
> >
> > anyone know of a good tutorial for annotating a picture and a pdf
> > with gimp? please reply-all
> > --
> > :-)~MIKE~(-:


 
SteveT

Steve Litt 
October 2017 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21