give text a background in Preview

trebber,

Move the image to the desktop, double click to open the image (it open in preview) from the menubar click tools then annotate, add text, click the image and make a rectangle and type your text. After typing in the menubar select inspector, from the dropdown select bordered, you can then click on fill color and select a color from the from the crayon box. Note that the entire rectangle will be filled , so you want to size that beforehand.

Hope this helps.

That's about it,as I know it, I ocassionally only insert some plain text. You can choose different shapes,and learning some keyboard shortcuts will speed it along, CMND I inspector, CMD T fonts, SHIFT CMD C colors, there more these are handy. CMND Z will delete mutiple layers it is my friend:)

You might also like to know - as you're running 10.6 and have Rosetta - that Adobe are giving away CS2 via their website, and that includes Acrobat Pro which gives you a lot of power and options over PDFs.

Check out PDFpen and PDFpen PRO:

http://www.smilesoftware.com/

The procedures given by sanjampet didn't work for me running Preview under 10.9.2. Here's how I was able to get colored text on a white rectangle background on an image:

1. Open the image in Preview

2. If not already visible, from the View menu select "Show Edit Toolbar".

3. In the Edit toolbar, click on the rectangle icon next to the Instant Alpha wand icon.

4. In the Edit toolbar, click on the Fill Color rectangle with the thin diagonal line across it, next to the Shape Attributes (line thickness) icon on the right.

5. Select the fill color for the shape, in this case white.

6. On the image, click and drag to create the rectangle filled with white.

7. From Preview's Tools menu select Annotate > Text.

8. Drag the text rectangle somewhere else on the image, it can't be created on top of the color-filled rectangle.

9. Enter the text and click out of the text rectangle.

10. Drag the text onto the color-filled rectangle to finish the process.

NOTE - I was unable to drag the color-filled rectangle over positioned text and somehow "send to back/backwards" as in some graphics programs, so the only method that works is to correctly place the color-filled rectangle first, then select and drag the text onto it.

Unfortunately this doesn't work in Snow Leopard - everything you've said is possible apart from 'Fill' which isn't a feature of Preview in 10.6.

However, with a bit of patience, it might be still be possible for the OP. Do this:

Follow instruction 1 above then

1. In View, click 'Show Annotations Toolbar' which will appear below the image.
2. Click the line thickness tool and choose the widest line possible.
3. In the colour menu, click Other Colors and click in the centre of the colour circle for white
4. Click the rectangle tool, and on the image draw a box to the WIDTH you need. Then collapse it so the bottom adjoins the top, giving you a white strip.
5. Repeat 4 as many times as necessary, moving each strip to adjoin the previous, until you have a rectangle as deep as you need. (If your positioning technique isn't perfect when you draw each strip, you could align the start of each strip, then finish with a vertical strip at the end, to hide the Lego-like offsets!)

Then follow instructions 7 - 10 above