The best way to capture and annotate images on the monitor

At some point, there will be a need to capture images on monitors and annotate , for use in reports, presentation, writings etc.

The basic way of getting this done is by using the 'PrtSc' button on the keyboard and annotating with a graphic software like Paint (for windows users). The process is the same for Linux user, 'PrtSc' prints the entire window. There are so many software that capture screen across the platforms, a search on Google will show most of them.

For users of Windows Vista, 7 , 8 and 10 , there's this wonderful software called Snipping Tool, it has to be in my view the best tool for screen capture. , represented by the icon shown below.

 

Click on the icon above (which can be found through a search or the favourite icons section), displays the window below.

 

Clicking on 'New' displays snipe options , which has been explained by windows.microsoft.com as :

 

Snips once made, can be saved as :

An Image file: Snips can be saved as (PNG,GIF and JPEG) file which be annotated and used for various purposes.

A HTML file: They can be also saved as a special type of HTML file called MHTML (Mime Hypertext Markup Language) which is optimised for emails, meaning that snips can be sent in emails

The software has one big flaw, it cannot annotate, does not have any text functions. Annotation can be done with any graphic software like Paint. However there's one graphic software that does the job quite well. It's called Draw.

The Draw software is an open source graphic software, originally part of the Openoffice Suite, that came with Writer,Calc, Impress as a component in the productivity suite from Apache. A fork of the software was named Libre was made when Apache was acquired by Oracle. The Open office and Libreoffice Draw are both available for downloads.

Open office Draw download page 

Libreoffice Draw comes as part of the suite and cannot be downloaded separately, to download suite ,go to Libre Office Download page.

The reason for the choosing of 'Draw' over other graphic software is more tools to work with. It's got more connectors, symbols and font work, it's just like Microsoft Word that is optimized for graphics.

To load image , click on the 'Insert' from the horizontal menu and select image from from the drop-down menu and then choose 'File' to select the filepath to the image file , choose 'Scan' to get image from scanner, choose 'Fontwork gallery' to use click-art from the system.

Once image has been uploaded to page, annotations and symbols can be added with the tools at the bottom of the page . Completed work can be saved as PDF (Portable Document Format) but a good alternative is snipe the work directly from the monitor. This method enables for cropping to the right size to be done at the same time.

Enjoy Snipping.