On the weekend I was tying to do the following.
I had received a scanned document, in PDF format. Most was legible, but a portion of one page wasn't: the middle third of page 11. I separately received a transcription of the illegible portion of text.
What I wanted to do was to create a new text object with an opaque background, enter the transcription into that text object, format it something like the original document, and place the text object over the top of the illegible section, thereby obscuring it.
Everything worked well except that text objects don't seem to have any background colour (at least, not one that I can configure), the background of all text objects is clear rather than opaque, and therefore it was not able to obscure the underlying image.
So adding a new text object on top of blurry text just made it harder to read anything, not easier.
Of course, instead of using a text object I could have used an annotation object, such as a Typewriter comment, which indeed can be set to have an opaque white background, as I wanted.
But the problem with that is that later I want to be able to add numerous small annotations to the document: typically short Typewriter comments, but also sometimes ovals, rectangles and arrows, relating to individual words or phrases in the text, and it is troublesome trying to create these over the top of a larger comment. Clicking the mouse tends to select the existing comment, rather than insert the new annotation. The workaround is to make the comment somewhere else, and then move/drag it into place, but it's inconvenient.
So then I thought that maybe I can insert an opaque white rectangle in between the underlying scan image and the new text object. However, as the rectangle was an annotation/comment, it seems to be impossible for it to be ordered underneath the text object: thus it always obscured both the new text object containing the transcription and the original image containing the blurry text.
In the end what I did is the following:
- Copy the image twice, to obtain three instances on that page.
- Crop the bottom two thirds of one image (in an external editor) and resize to match the top third of the original image.
- Crop the upper two thirds of another image (in an external editor) and resize to match the lower third of the original image.
- Place the new text object in the middle third of the page, using the blurry image text as a guide to size and styling.
- Delete the third (uncropped) image.
—DIV