Good programs to annotate images and graphs

Am 08.10.2018 um 11:20 schrieb Winfield Hill:

Maybe GIMP? (Gnu image manipulation program)

It is quite mighty; some like / some hate the user interface. I can live with it.

regards, Gerhard

Do you want an object (vector) editor which overlays its objects onto a background image? That way the objects are always subject to alteration. Else you could just use Paint... (Assuming you are on Windows X; you don't say!)

Mike.

Winfield Hill wrote

In Linux, for just adding text (and it can do a lot more) use the imagemagick programs

A command line tool, takes a second. If you have Linux installed chances are good it is already on your system, type convert

Winfield Hill wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@drn.newsguy.com:

Gimp is free...

Or you could place Ubuntu Studio onto a flash drive and boot that whenever you want to do an image editing session.

Ubuntu Studio has 3D and vector image edit capacity and also audio and music and video and CAD... Anything related to bathing our senses in imagery, text, facts, etc.

I use Gimp and Inkscape for all my manual image editing tasks. Inkscape is for vector graphics (svg) but you can import a bitmap picture and draw vector fonts and lines on top of it. You can draw outline color and width as you like.

Pere

Paint.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Right, I use paint for things like that. load pic, add arrows and text, save, send.

George H.

Nobody has described how annotation is done in any of these suggestions

- a crucial detail. I don't think Win wants to learn how to do it, just to find that it isn't what he wants.

An ideal annotator would:

- be object based so the annotation could be amended at any time (of course this is really a matter of the underlying file),

- be a 1-step process; - with the mouse, locate the tip of the pointer-line, - drag the line to the desired text location, - type in the text

- parametized line type (arrow or not, weight, color), text background box or not, text font, color, etc

Yes!

Gimp is free & does almost everything. The UI is not the friendliest, but once you know how to do something it's fine.

NT

Not ideal, but what I sometimes do is this sort of workflow:

1. Decide what the size of the graph is planned to be. Import that to MS-Paint.

1. Type the annotation in OpenOffice with a nice font you like. MS-Office and others work as well.

2. Stretch the horizontal axis by inserting spaces.

1. Stretch the vertical axis by customizing the line spacing.

Print the OpenOffice document to PDF and open. Copy the vertical and horizontal axis over using the snapshot function of the PDF reader. Must be done separately in two steps because else it wipes out the graph.

Annotations can also be created nicely with CAD software. A schematic file doesn't have to contain electronic components. I use Eagle and even do mechanical drawings with it. However, it's graphics import functions are very lacking or at least were up to version 7. Other CAD might be better here. IIRC someone did a wedding cake design using Eagle.

I use Irfanview (free) on Windoze: Be sure to install both the program and the corresponding plugins. Punch F12 for the text and arrows menu.

Examples of the paint plugin:

"Dia" has that, (I think you need to launch from the command-line to annotate pixel images), it doesn't do contrasting outlines though.

Inkscape ?

Cheers

, just

I pretty much get all that as part of Preview on OSX - the default file viewer that comes with the system. I can draw lines, add text, put any symbol I can type in the text box, etc. Change text colours, make background a different colour or transparent, pretty much a simple editor that works on images. I also use it to insert/subtract pages from

PDFs, shuffle the pages around and more...

Doesn't help you if you are not in MacLand though. Pity! (ducking)

John ;-#)#

Not to say that OSX is perfect, it isn't of course!

I use PDF-X-Change as a viewer and markup tool. If it's not already a .PDF, just print it to one.

Is this ok?

Inkscape is a great tool. I do all my documentation with Inkscape + Latex. I just know the few details I need to have my work done. But you can parameterize / automate a lot of things. Like Latex, it is one tool worth learning.

Pere

Me too, used it for decades and wouldn't be without it.

I use PaintShop Pro for more advanced graphic editing, but switch back to IrfanView for fast text annotations. And many other basic tasks like cropping, horizon-straightening, framing, etc. It's also my Windows associated program for opening JPGs, BMPs, GIFs, etc from a double-click.

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Another Irfanview recommendation here. It also works well on Linux under wine.