Preview Create New Document from PDF Highlights

EDIT (Update): You know what? This (free and apparently awesome) program actually seems to do exactly what you want via its Export-function. That should be a much better solution for you.

There's an "Extract PDF annotations" action available for OS X in the Automator application. It doesn't seem to be able to extract highlighted text though, just actual annotations. Now - what you could do to get this to work is, each time you highlight something, add a note to it and paste the highlighted text into that note.

It might not be too cumbersome if you use keyboard shortcuts:

* Select the part that you want to highlight

* Press ⌘-C (copy)
* Press ^⌘-H (highlight)​

* Press ^⌘-N (enter note-creation mode) and click next to the highlighted portion

* Press ⌘-V (paste)​

* Press ^⌘-N (to exit out of the note-creation mode)

This may seem overly complicated and it sure isn't exactly Mac-like, but you'll get pretty quick at this after a bit of practice.

There is a really simple yet robust tool for extracting highlights and notes from your pdf-files available at: http://www.sumnotes.net . Not only it supports various advanced features like selective extraction or predictive extraction, but it also allows you to save extracted highlights into TXT or DOC files. All desktop browsers and operating systems are supported. We are in cloud, so no installation is needed. And yes, it is for free. Try it out.

holdenn said:

There is a really simple yet robust tool for extracting highlights and notes from your pdf-files available at: http://www.sumnotes.net . Not only it supports various advanced features like selective extraction or predictive extraction, but it also allows you to save extracted highlights into TXT or DOC files. All desktop browsers and operating systems are supported. We are in cloud, so no installation is needed. And yes, it is for free. Try it out.

Click to expand...

I tried to use this with one of my pdf files for Anthropology and it didn't work. None of my highlighted notes went into the program and the whole document was blank. Am I doing something wrong?

If you're looking to extract highlights & notes from your PDF, Skim.app is your best bet. In fact, it has great AppleScript support too, so you could automate the extraction of annotations from all your PDFs in a folder, copy it automatically into one Word document or Evernote note.

I wrote an app PDFoo, which not only extracts annotations (highlights & notes) from a PDF but also appends a URL to each annotation such that clicking on the URL opens up the PDF back to where the annotation appears in the PDF. It helps a lot with looking up context. I save these extracted annotations together with accompanying PDFoo URLs in Evernote.

AppleFanatic10 said:

I tried to use this with one of my pdf files for Anthropology and it didn't work. None of my highlighted notes went into the program and the whole document was blank. Am I doing something wrong?

Click to expand...

Could you please send me your PDF file so I can have a look ? We are constantly improving the extraction engine and since my last post we've added lot's of features like:

Exporting to Evernote
Export to Email
Premium accounts with extra features

We can be reached via email: support@sumnotes.net or via our official facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/sumnotes