Importing and Annotating Documents in Journal

If you’ve been working in Windows Journal (all the livelong day . . .) — and enjoying how easy it is to write directly on electronic documents and use features such as the Highlighter and Eraser tools to manipulate electronic ink — then you’ve got a treat in store: You aren’t limited to working with Journal notes: You can work with just about any document by importing it into the Journal environment.

Getting into the import business

When you import a document created in another application, the document comes into Journal as a document image. What you do to annotate such an image doesn’t change the contents of the original document directly. You are only able to add handwriting to the image, just as you might insert a photo in a note and draw annotations on it.

For example, say you import a proposal that was created in Word XP as a document image, which you save in Journal. If you use the Eraser tool in Journal, you can’t erase portions of the image (that is, you can’t change any content from the original Word document); you can only add and delete Ink.

But marking up (or adding to) an existing document can be useful. You can even import a form, write in the blank spaces to fill it out, and then print the completed form (or even e-mail it). The ink you’ve added isn’t part of the form, but the end result — especially if it’s a hard copy — works the same as any printed form to get the information across.

Tip If you perform a search in Journal, you won’t uncover any content from the original document that has been imported as a document image, but you will find any content that you added to the document image by using text boxes or handwriting.

Importing documents as document images

There are two ways to import files to Windows Journal:

You can choose FileðImport, locate a file, and then open it.

Looking for more specifics? That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Warning! Graphics files won’t work with the Import command from Journal. Instead, use the InsertðPicture process to insert this file format. Note that TIFF files are the exception to this rule — you can import them into Journal as documents.
You can use Windows Journal Note Writer.

When you use Journal Note Writer to import documents, you choose to print a document (you know, good old FileðPrint) you’ve already created in an application such as Word, with one important difference: You select Windows Journal Note Writer itself as the printer to use. If you’re working in the other application, it can be quicker to print to Journal from there than to open Journal and do an import.

Tip You speed demons out there can also drag and drop a document into Windows Journal. Just open a new, blank Journal Note, use Windows Explorer to locate a file, and drag the file into the Journal window. Journal opens the originating application for the document and begins the import procedure.

Follow these steps to import a Word document into Journal:

Open a Word document.
Choose FileðPrint. The Print dialog box opens.
Select Journal Note Writer from the Name list.
Make any other needed adjustments.

For example, you can specify whether to print the whole document (or just certain pages) or specify more than one copy of the document.
Tap OK.

The document appears in a Journal window, as shown in Figure 13-3.

Figure 13-3: The document is now an image in Journal, ready for you to write on it, highlight it, or add things to it.

The document in Journal is now at your mercy (insert villainous laugh here). You can write on it, use the highlighter, insert pictures and text boxes into it, and otherwise mark up, deface, or modify it.

Now you can use your Journal tools to mark up the document. Figure 13-4 gives you an idea of how this would look.

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Figure 13-4: This document image has been annotated to help the reader understand how to fill in a form.