Saturday, June 17, 2017

[solved] A "simple" line and arrow photo mod

Twenty years on in Linux, it's still not easy to take a PNG or JPG and circle something, do a simple straight line, a straight line with an arrow and text, etc, and then resave the file at the same resolution.
  • Xournal will not open PNGs
  • GIMP has rasterized, freehand looking garbage, else you learn to do colored paths with transparent fills, which only works for the circles. Ludicrous.
  • DIA appears unreliable opening PNG's -- it will snap lines to weird locations and so on.
  • Libre Office, could be installed, and then one could add, say, "Draw", which will work on adding arrows, if a person can put up with the immense installation, memory use, and significant updates.
So there's no simple way to note these photos unless one has a large application. Since Inkscape is smaller than Libre Office... OK then, Inkscape it is, though you know it's not going to be easy.

Inkscape: Line and arrow - lots of keystrokes

From this site, there's an unhelpfully incomplete version, to which I've added important steps.
  1. Open the PNG
    "File" -> "Open", then select the PNG
  2. Open "lines mode"
    Select lines from side menu or (Shift+F6)
  3. Make a line
    Click the starting point of the line, click its ending point, and then press "enter" key. The line is not done until "enter" is pressed.
  4. Adjust the line features
    • "Object" --> "Fill and Stroke", or (Shift+Ctrl+F) opens the Fill and Stroke Dialog. A new half-page dialog window appears.
    • Select "Stroke Style" tab. Here you can increase width of the line from 1 pixel to whatever's comfortable.
  5. Select an arrowhead
    Also within the "Stroke Style" tab are "Markers". These are the ending points of the line. Choose an arrow or some other shape for the Start Marker or End Marker of the line.
  6. Save the changes
    "File" --> "Save", or export it to a new file. If exporting, select the entire page or just some selected region.