Export all highlighted text in a PDF to a file

Recent versions of PDF Studio come with the ability to export highlighted text from a PDF document.

  1. Open any PDF with text highlights
  2. From the Comments Tab choose  Export, and select “Highlighted Text”
  3. Select a location to save the exported text and click save

The exported file will be a plain text file with all highlighted text separated by pages.

Thanks for this new feature, it is no longer needed for users to enable the “Copy text to note” option unless they need the text to also be copied to the note for other reasons.

PDF Studio 2019 & older

In older versions of PDF Studio, to export highlighted text in a PDF to a file you will first need to turn on “Copy text to note” and then highlight your document. Afterwards the highlighted text can be exported to various formats.

Note: This will only work for new annotations going forward. This will not export current existing annotations. 

How to highlight and export comments

  1. Open up the settings menu by clicking on Edit->Preferences
  2. One the left hand side click on Comments
  3. CHECK the “Copy text to note” box from the Text Markup section.
  4. Highlight your document as you normally would.
  5. Export the comments into the format that you need using one of the below methods:
    1. From the Comments Tab choose  Export, select the format you wish to export
    2. Open the comments pane by clicking on the Comments button at the bottom left of PDF Studio. Then click on the down arrow to open the export menu and select the format you wish to export
    3. On the menu bar go to Comments->Export Comments and select the format you wish to export

Comments can be exported in the following formats

  • FDF: File format created by Adobe that is supported by most PDF applications
  • XFDF: Extended FDF file format created by Adobe that is supported by most PDF applications
  • Text: Simple text file (.txt) that will contain all of the annotation information
  • XML: File format that is similar to an Excel file that will contain all of the annotation information. See Exporting Comments to Excel