Full Guide on How to Extract Highlighted Text from PDF

Introduction:

Most of us are accustomed to using highlighters to emphasize important information in PDFs. There are many programs used to highlight text in PDFs on the market. How to extract highlighted text from PDF for viewing important information efficiently? How fortunate you are! This comprehensive guide post can give you a hand, including four excellent PDF highlight extractors and step-by-step guidance. Let’s delve into this post guide now!

In the following paragraphs, I will recommend four PDF highlight extractors, including Sumnotes, Foxit PDF Reader, PDF Highlight Extractor, and PDF Studio. Meanwhile, the comprehensive tutorial is also included. If you are also looking for ways to highlight PDFs efficiently, give SwifDoo PDF a try, which comes with a wide range of PDF editing, annotating, protecting, and managing features.

Online Way to Extract Highlighted Text from PDF via Sumnotes

Sumnotes is a wonderful online tool for managing PDF and Kindle annotations, which greatly enhances your working efficiency. This robust PDF highlight extractor enables you to extract highlighted text or annotations from your PDF documents.

What’s more, Sumnotes allows you to change the color of the highlights and categorize highlights. Are you interested in Sumnotes? If so, follow the steps below to export highlighted text from PDF using Sumnotes.

Step 1. Go to Sumnotes’ official website and click Sign in to log in with your account.

Step 2. Click the Import button. You can select the “From Computer” option to import your PDF document from your PC. Alternatively, you can click the “From Google Drive”, “Amazon Kindle”, or “Instapaper” option to import the target file.

Step 3. Give Sumnotes a few seconds to analyze this PDF file with highlighted text. Next, you can click the View Annotations option to check the highlighted text.

Step 4. You can see all the highlighted text and notes displayed here. Open the Include list and choose the Highlights only option. Meanwhile, you can customize settings for page numbers, order, and included color. Next, you can choose to export the highlighted text as a TXT, DOC, or XLS file. Or, you can choose the Clipboard, EMAIL, or Evernote option.

Extract Highlighted Text from a PDF Using Foxit PDF Reader

Foxit PDF Reader is a robust PDF editor and reader. With its various useful features, you can annotate PDFs, convert scanned PDFs to searchable and editable PDFs with OCR, add signatures to PDFs, and more.

Returning to the topic of this guide post, Foxit PDF Reader also offers the feature to extract highlighted text, enabling you to compile crucial information from annotated PDFs efficiently. Check the steps below to export highlighted text from a PDF via Foxit PDF Reader.

Step 1. Download the installer of Foxit PDF Reader from its official website and then install it on your PC.

Step 2. Launch Foxit PDF Reader and click "Open File" under the "Home" tab to import the PDF with highlighted text. Next, switch from the Home tab to the Comment tab.

Step 3. Open the Export dropdown and click the Highlighted Text option.

Step 4. Next, the Save As window will pop up, you can give a name to the file, specify a folder to save it, and choose the output format from the CSV Files (*.csv) or Text Files(*.txt). Finally, click the Save button.

Get Highlighted Text from a PDF via PDF Highlight Extractor

As its name shows, PDF Highlight Extractor is an extractor for getting highlighted text from PDF files. In addition to extracting highlighted text, it also supports extracting notes and comments. After that, it saves the extracted content as CSV files. Follow me to read the guide below and have a try.

Step 1. Visit the official website of PDF Highlight Extractor via any browser on your device.

Step 2. Hit the Choose File tab, locate the folder where you saved the target PDF file, choose the PDF file, and click Open.

Step 3. Next, tick the Highlight checkbox and click the Extract Annotations button. Once the extraction process finishes, click the Download button to save the file.

Export Highlighted Text from PDF with PDF Studio

PDF Studio is a powerful PDF editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which is a reliable Adobe Acrobat alternative. Without the need to copy and paste the highlighted text into a new file, PDF Studio enables you to directly export highlighted text from PDFs. Let’s learn how to make the highlighted text extraction from a PDF with PDF Studio. 

Step 1. Visit the official PDF Studio website and download the corresponding installer for your PC. Next, install this PDF highlight extractor according to the on-screen installation instructions.

Step 2. Run PDF Studio and click Open file to import the PDF document with the highlighted text you want to extract.

Step 3. Navigate to the Comment subtab from the top menu, open the Export list, and click the Highlighted Text (Text) option.

Step 4. Name the file for the extracted highlight text, choose the output format, and click Save.

A Comparison of the Above 4 PDF Highlighted Text Extractors

All in all, if you have a limited budget, choose PDF Highlight Extractor or the free version of Foxit PDF Reader. If you need a cross-platform tool to extract highlighted text without downloading any software, Sumnotes and PDF Highlight Extractor should be your choice. Provided that you want to perform more PDF editing tasks, PDF Studio, a feature-rich PDF editor, can match your needs.

Conclusion

Using a reliable PDF highlight extractor can make your tedious PDF work complete efficiently. How to extract highlighted text from PDF to compile key information with no hassle? Tools, like Sumnotes, Foxit PDF Reader, PDF Highlight Extractor, and PDF Studio, can give you a hand. If you want to highlight key information or add annotations to PDFs, give SwifDoo PDF a try.