#57 Place Highlighter behind other strokes

[Anonymous]

Currently, highlighting existing strokes places the highlighter on top of the text. This obscures the stroke and makes highlighted text especially hard to read when I'm using my projector.

What would be great is putting any highlighting marks below all other strokes.

I've attached an example of the difference between highlighting above and below is.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

A comparison of highlighting marks above and below other strokes.

[Denis Auroux]

This is already in the to-do list (as requested in tracker item #1809410, somehow in the "bugs" section).

As noted there, highlighter strokes will still land on top of the paper background (e.g. the PDF file being annotated) -- so when annotating a PDF file with the highlighter, such a change won't help at all. I agree it'd still be useful to have an option to place highlighter strokes below other strokes in the same layer, for cases when one isn't annotating a PDF.

In the long term, my thinking is that the correct thing to do would be to change the alpha-compositing rule for transparency effects in libgnomecanvas - though I'm not sure if that's possible.

Also note: right now, you can make things slightly better by changing the transparency level of the highlighter. In the xournal configuration file ($HOME/.xournal/config -- save preferences once if it doesn't exist yet), look for the line that says
highlighter_opacity=0.50
Many people report that changing it to a lower level, for example 0.20, is more pleasant.

Denis