Can I create a reusable text annotation style in QGIS?

Question

I want to create a fairly simple map with a few locations emphasized using annotations.

I don't like the default annotation formatting:

So, I've reformatted the annotation background color, border color, fonts, font sizes, marker size, etc. to something that I prefer:

How do I re-use this same formatting on several other annotations without having to re-set each of the text annotations' formatting by hand? I cannot copy and paste one annotation (that would be nice). I believe the html annotation might be a solution, but I cannot find any good documentation describing how to use it.

An even better solution would be to automatically label each feature using this format, and pulling the content of the label from fields within the feature layer. Hmm, perhaps I should investigate labels instead of annotation?

Answer 1

The closest simple approach I can think of is to use the HTML annotation. You can set everything up in a template HTML file and then edit the file to create new annotations as required. This isn't a perfect solution for what you want (as the background will only fill the main body of the annotation and not the arrow for instance). You could do a similar thing with SVG annotations (making a template etc).

Alternatively you could use a form annotation and for a description of this see this YouTube video.