IsThere an easy way to annotate PDFs or images?

[Goverp]

I want to "translate" a bunch of photos of huge vellum court documents, handwritten in 18th century "Secretary hand", small print, vast areas covered in legalese. At least they're in 18th century English, albeit badly spelled. My task is thus OCR, using the Human Eyeball Mk 1. It's a real pain using say an text file and an image viewer, 'cos at readable scale, the images are 2 or 3 screens wide; also, the scribes weren't very good at keeping their lines straight. So switching from one screen to another, or even another window below, and/or scrolling left and right, is a pain as you lose your place.

Is there software that makes it easy to annotate the images with lines of translation? I know the Gimp and its ilk and okular have functions that do this, but they seem a bit clunky - they're good for the occasional markup, but in my experience not ideal for entering multiple long lines lines of text over/by the original, especially if they wander up and down the page. (What I'd really love is a 150% zoomed printout on a roll of wallpaper and a pen using perhaps fluorescent ink!) Maybe I've not tried hard enough with okular.
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Greybeard

[jg72]

maybe Xournal++ can help you:

https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

Or try using inksckape, insert the pdf as image and then use the text-tool to write.

[Goverp]

Playing some more with okular: it works for adding annotations, bit clunky but probably OK. But there's no official way to export the annotations to a text file. Looking at the .okular archive, it's a zip file containing the image or pdf, and a couple of xml files, one of which contains the annotations. So a bit of hackery with some xml filter (if I try hard I can remember this stuff) will do the job - all the text, though looking at the xml, not necessarily in the right order!

xournalpp looks interesting, but I don't want to substitute trying to read secretary hand with trying to read my own handwriting. Since the arrival of PCs, laptops, notebooks, tablets and mobile phones I've lost the ability to write legibly!
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Greybeard

[xgivolari]

For my uni work, I use app-text/evince (GNOME Document Viewer) to annotate PDFs. It is very convenient and easy to use, but it does not support any image formats. If converting your existing images to a supported format is not an issue, I can only recommend using it.