Most Wanted

[egrabrych]

Everyone knows what you can do with a piece of paper, even with a tidy, important text printed on it. You can scribble and scrawl on it.

Naturally, I don’t mean scribbling for scribbling’s sake, but complementing the printed text with one’s own hand-written notes, suggestions, and additions, which are directly related to it.

A sort of substitute for what I’m talking about are the so called “comments” – in Word, for example. Nicely placed in the margin, strictly beside the relevant parts of the text. But everyone using them will agree with me that it is as inconvenient and uncomfortable as doing sports in a suit and tie. What I’d like is to have as much freedom as with a pen and paper, and to be able to scrawl and scribble on a page however I want.

Of course, I know that a graphics tablet and stylus allow to handwrite in a digital environment, but that’s not what I’m asking about. It’s common knowledge that “CAD” applications create files with layers: different things are put on separate layers, but these layers are interconnected and can be seen together at any moment, creating a spatial arrangement of all the elements. And these sorts of systems of layers are what I’m talking about.

In other words: has anyone ever heard of an application, which could function as a connector and bind together my scribbles and documents (with formatted text), in such a way that the graphical elements would be permanently attributed to the formatted text (i.e. they would never change their relative position in result of scaling and such).

In short: to be able to scribble over the displayed document (without tampering with its content), and see these scribbles, so that their relation to the particular parts of the text was clear and unchanging.

Does such a program, a combiner, exist at all?

[jumper]

If you export the document to PDF, professional PDF editors should allow you to scribble over it as a second layer.

[egrabrych]

Indeed, I haven't considered Adobe Acrobat, probably because I've never used it. The license costs, well, about as much as Windows + "MS Office Home & Students".

And unfortunately, for free there are only PDF creators, not PDF editors - they make PDF files just like virtual printers do, and that's something completely different.

But whatever, there's a whole world out there and I might have simply never heard of some programs that would do the trick. In any case, thanks for pointing me in possibly the right direction.

Oh, and I'm sorry I'm answering so late.

[jumper]

How about an HTML/webpage editor? Ideally a word processor that can save your formatted text as a webpage and then import transparent graphics that can float over the text and be positioned as desired. The result could be saved and viewed in any web browser. The text would remain searchable, copyable, editable. If words and paragraphs are <span>ed, scribbles could be positioned relative to any one of them and stay with them as they reflow.

[ROTS]

You sound like your trying to create ASCII art really fast OP? ASCII being an artform could be made in a program that does just that with formatted images. I don't even know how they get all those characters.

In photoshop ( or any layer image editor ), you can make an image, at any size, and then have text over the image, to match the image, shape, for whatver purpose. Basically a collage.

A desktop publishing editor, like quark and Indesign, you can make words flow in any direction and at any point, in all kinds of ways. Keep in mind that earlier desktop publishing programs do not work well, with their later counter parts. You have to convert from program to program to program, if the function is allowed.

The same could be said about illustrator and CAD related programs. You should be able to do the same thing in photoshop but alot more annoying.

Their are many plugins and programs that can shape words in different ways, many of course are not in western languages.

Edited December 18, 2013 by ROTS