Type A Note On Screen Before Taking Screenshot

[nkormanik]

What might be the best way of typing a note on the screen before taking a screenshot with Screenshot Captor?

Sometimes I'd like to 'annotate' what and why I'm taking the screenshot.  Would be super to have a small movable note to that effect.  I'd prefer a white rectangular background.  Minimalist.  Editable.  Adjustable-sized font.  Closely cropped to the text.

Thanks!

Nicholas Kormanik

[mouser]

The easiest thing would be to add a caption AFTER the capture, from the main SC window.
You can click the toolbar button for Text Object (near bottom) to add a text box.

But if you are always wanting to add a caption, you can have SC help you by first making sure you have the post-capture dialog set to show after each screenshot:
[attach]

[IainB]

@nkormanik:
Where you write:

What might be the best way of typing a note on the screen before taking a screenshot with Screenshot Captor?
Sometimes I'd like to 'annotate' what and why I'm taking the screenshot.  Would be super to have a small movable note to that effect.  I'd prefer a white rectangular background.  Minimalist.  Editable.  Adjustable-sized font.  Closely cropped to the text.

I think the answer depends on your requirements. For example, I have a similar requirement - I very often want to annotate captured images. For me, those notes are important and useful as they become data or metadata for that image, so I need to have them searchable and copyable.

I tend to do this in one of three ways, depending on how I intend to use the image and the metadata:

• (a) USE CHS + SC: (Favourite #1 way.) Using SC (ScreenshotCaptor), capture the screenshot/clip image into my CHS (Clipboard Help & Spell) database, and add a note about the circumstances/context of capture to the text tab for that image. CHS is great for this as it enables managing and real fast searching of any text attached to my library of captured images. Good for when you want to keep those details noted and searchable, but don't necessarily need/want the notes themselves to be displayed in the actual image.
  
• (b) USE CHS + SC: (Favourite #2 way.) Using SC (ScreenshotCaptor), capture the screenshot/clip image into my CHS (Clipboard Help & Spell) database, and then EDIT the image using SC and add a caption or add/embed a text note object into the image itself - in the same way as @mouser suggests. When I do this, I also copy the text of that note and paste it to the text tab for that image in CHS. Again CHS is great for this as it enables managing and real fast searching of any text attached to my library of captured images. Good for when you want to keep those details noted and searchable - they wouldn't be searchable if you didn't copy/paste the text into the CHS text tab that you had put into the image.
  
• (c) Use MS OneNote: (Favourite #1 way for more complex annotation.) Capture and annotate using OneNote, SC and CHS in combination - for example, as in this post: For research, don't take notes, just use clip-to-OneNote
  The method for using OneNote like this when making a complex image+text posting to DCF is described here:
  

  ...My organisation and use of Notebooks is pretty minimalistic, so I am not into beautifully designed pages such as that digital DM Notebook seems to be.
  After a period of experimentation, I learned to organise my notes using macros and templates as much as possible, and create notes usually using indented numbered or bulleted (collapsible) sections and subsections. As discussed in an earlier post, I also use table cells quite often as "containers" for text and images, since their boundaries are more "sticky" than the main containers on a Notebook page. Containers and images can be dragged and resized.
  You can create and assemble/arrange several containers in a page, and overlay them and add drawings/shapes. They "float" as objects in layers over the page, but they do not retain any attachment or fixed relationship to each other, so that if you change one container, the page layout starts to get messed up. I think that's a limitation.
  I work around it by taking a screenshot (OneNote clip) which gives you a single image of the assembled containers/objects - which latter can then be deleted and replaced by the single image in the clip. Any embedded text in that image is automatically OCR'd and becomes searchable and copyable, so nothing gets "lost".
  
  If you select and copy a selection of formatted text and images, and paste the contents of the clipboard into (say) irfanview, the whole thing - formatted text and images - pastes as a single image. I sometimes post those single images to a DCF post as my notes. This can save a lot of time - no more messing about with the kludgy BB formatting codes in the DC Forum post editor - I just post the image (sometimes with the same clipboard contents posted as the actual, but unformatted plain text in a spoiler, so people can grab that text if/when they need it - e.g., for hyperlinks).
  Hope that all makes sense.

[mouser]

Having said all this -- I can see some value in having a simple app that would let you overlay text on your screen and easily move it around, change size+text.
Wouldn't be too hard too do.  Could be useful for people recording video of screen, etc.
It would be a standalone app -- I wonder if someone would consider making such a coding snack..

[rjbull]

Why not just use a sticky notes program?  Stickies (free) and Notezilla (payware) have been popular on DC.  There are many others.  I generally (from inertia) use Magic Notes (payware).

[Ath]

It would be a standalone app -- I wonder if someone would consider making such a coding snack..

Well, AFAICS that's already done quite alright in the fine SysInternals utility ZoomIt

[mouser]

Sticky Notes and ZoomIT, both excellent solutions.. Thanks rjbull+Ath. 

[IainB]

Just thinking a bit more about this: Regardless of how the text is put into the image (e.g., whether using ScreenshotCaptor edits, or ZoomIT, or StickyNotes, etc.), there is one image file format that would ensure that that text data becomes persistent, portable and searchable - .TIFF
Refer:

• TIFF File Format Summary
• TIFF - Wikipedia
• TIFF and TIF Files Explained, and How to Open Them
• Image Types: JPEG & TIFF File Formats - Cambridge in Colour

For years, whenever I migrated to a new laptop, one of the first things I did was to ensure that iFilters were installed for OCR (Optical Character Reading) of .TIFF image files, so that WDS (Windows Desktop Search) could then be enabled to search for text content in those .TIFF image files.

However, in Windows 10, these iFilters now seem to be included by default - hurrah! Goodness knows why it's taken Microsoft this long to get around to doing that. If you look at the WDS settings (Advanced - File Types) you will see they are already set thus:


So, there's yet another approach - and a standards-based one at that - to saving/accessing images containing text.