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Is there a command-line solution to extract highlighted text from pdf?

I have a bunch of pdf documents where I personally annotated, and was wondering if there is a convenient way to automatically extract this to the text file

EDIT This is not a duplicate question in that I am looking for a command-line solution like ImageMagick for image processing.

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I would recommend usage of the nifty little Python library pdfannots, which has the very capability you are looking for.

$ pdfannots document.pdf

If combined with some other Bash commands, it can produce nicely formatted output. For example:

$ pdfannots document.pdf --no-condense | \
# Removing duplicate lines:
cat -n | sort -uk2 | sort -nk1 | cut -f2- | \
# Improving output formatting:
awk '{$1=$1};1' | sed 's/^\(> \)//g' | sed 's/* Page #/\n&/'
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Under Linux you can use pdfgrep

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  • How is it possible to extract highlighted text with pdfgrep?
    – joelostblom
    Jul 4, 2019 at 22:27
  • I was thinking there will be some sort of tag around highlighted text which can be parse with pdfgrep...
    – Pierre-Damien
    Jul 16, 2019 at 13:35
  • nope -- default highlighting is coordinate positions only
    – Mike M
    Oct 11, 2020 at 13:26

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