I’m preparing screenshots for a docbook handbook, and I have two images which I need to annotate by adding some letters “A,” “B,” “C,” etc. For previous versions, I used gimp, which is clearly overkill, and it always took me far too long, by the time I figured out or remembered all the bits and pieces I needed. I tried gwenview, and was absolutely unable to figure out how to configure the annotations to set the text color to not have white fill. I also tried kolourpaint, which is what I’ll use for now, but it appears the annotations are immediately painted into the image, so other than undo and try again, there is no adjusting size or position. Both gwenview and kolourpaint have handbooks many years old, so they were essentially useless. I’ve seen some recommendations for Pinta, but it appears to have a huge pile of dotnet related dependencies I would prefer to avoid.
Is it really so hard just to add some large single letters on top of an image, or am I missing something? Are the handbooks for two popular KDE apps really that out of date, or am I missing something? I’m using Gentoo Linux. I really hope I’ve just missed reading some fine manual, but I’m getting pretty discouraged by this.
Thanks for any pointers or suggestions.
gwenview is probably the better choice, the text tool has a border/fill color selector but you can’t choose to have both a border and no fill (at least not on my version).
you can also make annotations in okular
krita is also an option but it much like gimp, it is over kill.
i might recommend BoxySVG as something between the simple annotations of qwenview and the full on layer features of krita if you don’t want to keep using kolourpaint
Spectacle itself has some annotation tools, and is what I use if I want to mark things as I go, but not later, after the fact. The text input is pretty clear and simpler, without the clunkiness in Gwenview’s tools, including moving the text block.
Hi - on the Gwenview side, you might be running into 502650 – Annotation options, such as color, fill, and border, cannot be changed for the annotation choices.
This is might sound crazy, but…I actually like Impress/PowerPoint for this type of use case. Paste a screenshot onto a blank slide, add whatever shapes you want with a lot of customization, export as an image - and then swap out the image and rearrange the shapes however you need for your next one. Save the presentation file, and you can go back and update or tweak the annotated images however you want later on!
It’s probably not the most technically correct way to do any of it, but I had to make a lot of user guides and walkthrough slide decks in my corporate job, and I got into a good flow with that approach 
I am regurgitating an idea I posted in recent discussion thread regarding using ScribusGenerator script in Scribus to overlay text on handbooks. This overlay can be used to create a batch of business cards but can be used easily in your scenario. Your injected variables would be the characters “A”, “B”, “C” etc.
Spectacle (easy to drag a number at least), Gwenview would be my main choice - I use it to quickly put labels with arrows on a map of my local area.
Thanks for the responses. I ended up using kolourpaint. I did try spectacle (which is what I’m using to capture the screen shots) but couldn’t figure out how to change the text size. I’ll probably have other config questions when I have more time to play instead of getting the Handbook done.
With Spectacle, it should look like this:
Click the font name to change – this really needs to looks a bit more like a button to click.
I forgot about the Number bubble option as well, which has similar fill, color, and font options.
When using the region selection option, you can actually annotate before selecting the area and taking the screengrab:
And every time you click on the font name, it pops up yet another font configuration dialog. Perhaps a bug? One should be enough, no? (And thanks for that hint - I have absolutely no idea why I didn’t find it, as I was clicking about anywhere to get to a config screen.
Lol, I never noticed it before, but it has been bit since I actually changed the font type, just the size. Very annoying
I find tgif easy to use for this and a great many other purposes.
cross posting this here because it seems like the same issue