hi-lighting lines on a census page?

Hi listers,
I was wondering if this was possible and how to do it.
What I would like to do is highlight the family on a census image saved from
ancestry and then print it for a book.
Yes, I could use a highlighter pen after printing but I was hoping that I
would have more colour options on the computer.
I am guessing that it would involve selecting a rectangle shape around the
area and then filling with a transparent colour?
Would there be anyone who could suggest a common photo editing program that
would do this, hopefully one which I could get for free.
I do have the standard Office suite and WindowsXp but have not come across a
method yet.
Thanks for any help,
Sharon

Paul Blair...

Word has a highlighting option. Make sure the Formatting toolbar is on
(View/Toolbars/Formatting) and somewhere on it (in my case, I found it
in a dropdown) there is an icon with "ab" and a pencil...click on that.
Then drag the resulting pointer over the text you want to highlight.

Or type "highlight" into Help!

john...

I've just done what you want using the free Paint.NET
I imported an image, added a layer, set the layer opacity to about 100
from 255, selected the paintbrush, selected the highlight colour,
selected the fill style to 20%, set the brush width to 40 and then
highlighted text. You can save to the native format which keeps the
layers and so allows you to remove the layer and get back to the
original or you can save to a new GIF/JPG file and your highlighting
will be incorporated. Playing with those various functions/tools should
allow you to get exactly the desired effect you seek.

singhals...

Uhhh, isn't that going to make printing the book pretty expensive? I
mean, B&W Xerox copies are a nickle each, but color copies are 80c each.

Why not cut'n'paste instead? Crop and keep the headers, then crop and
paste onto the headers the family lines ... or ... keep one image, but
erase everything but the headers and your family?