What Are Annotations?

Annotations are digitized versions of the marks commonly used on documents in a paper-based environment; for example, highlight, rubber stamps, and text notes.

Like their paper-based counterparts, digitized annotation marks are typically used to prepare documents for subsequent handling in a business process.  However, digitized annotations provide additional benefits that paper-based tools do not:

• Digitized annotations can be added, moved, and deleted at will.
  
  
• The attributes of digitized annotations (such as color, size, text, and visibility) can be readily modified.
  
  
• Digitized annotations can be linked to pages in image documents, to other files on the user's system, or to Universal Resource Locators (URLs) on the World Wide Web.  Such annotations become hypertext jumps, similar to those encountered on the Web.
  
  
• Groups of digitized annotations can be named.  The named groups can then be selectively acted upon.

Annotation marks can be saved within a TIFF image file as annotation data that is kept separate from the image data.  The marks can also be merged with the image data in a process known as burning-in.  To save annotations to any file type other than TIFF, the annotations must be burned-in.

Burning-in converts the annotation marks into image pixels and merges them with the underlying image pixels in the process.  Once annotations are burned-in, they become part of the base image and can no longer be manipulated by the annotation functions.

Notes: Linked annotations cease to function as hypertext jumps when they are burned in.

Hyperlink annotations are available with Imaging for Windows Professional Edition V1.0, V1.1, and V2.0 only.