Support/ScreenshotAnnotator

Basic annotation description

An annotation is a simple frame + text overlaid on a screenshot to make it easy to point out the area of focus in a screenshot.

Screenshot Annotator Requirements

An annotation will consist of:

• A rectangular frame that will appear
  • Coordinates for the rectangular frame
• Text to show by default (DefaultText), when the mouse is not hovering over the annotation
• Text to show when hovering over the annotation (HoverText). This text should replace DefaultText.

Syntax requirements

• DefaultText and HoverText should support full TikiWiki syntax, meaning Bold text, Italic text, new lines (%%%) and Links should be supported
• The syntax for an annotation must be robust enough to support the above, but at the same time simple enough to be human readable. Nelson to figure out a good syntax based on feedback from TikiWiki community.

Review requirements

• An annotation will simply be a block of wiki code attached to the wiki body of an article containing an image. As such, it will be part of the article itself, subject to the same review process as a normal wiki edit, and fully localizable.
• Saving an annotation edit should modify the staging copy of the article, not the live article

Style requirements

• All CSS used for e.g. frame border and background, and text style, should be globally part of the theme used on SUMO

Notes regarding possible way to localize annotations

Nelson Ko: We have a Google SoC student working on a screenshot annotation system for us: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/ScreenshotAnnotator but I was wondering if annotations could become translatable.

LPH: depends on how they store the data. best would probably to have it stored as part of the wiki page, otherwise the annotations need to have objectids to work with the tiki_translated_objects table

Nelson Ko: as XML as per http://www.fotonotes.net/ (haven't decided where exactly, i,e, in db or what)

LPH: but then you need additional tracking stuff

Nelson Ko: probably there will be a tiki_image_annotations table or something

LPH: the stuff I wrote is mostly specific to wiki pages because nothing else keeps a history, but if they keep revision history of their XML, the translation bit magic can be adapted

Nelson Ko: so history is necessary for translation system to work I suppose

LPH: otherwise you can't diff. However, with XML, it may be possible to add version data as attributes on the notes, but that could be a mess to manage depending on the type of content in there and the structure of the annotation XML, this could actually be a viable solution

Nelson Ko: http://www.fotonotes.net/fotonotexml.html

LPH: yep... if you add a version attribute on the content tag, there is something to do about this. Each region already has a unique identifier