I have some problem saving highlighted pdf text to a document with Automator. When creating the workflow, I selected "extract pdf annotation" in the action library, but the result of extraction displayed nothing but some hyphen or so no matter which option or options I checked in "Annotation Kinds" and "Fields to Extract", I want to know if there is some way to fix this.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Would it not be easier to have the PDF open alongside the destination document, then just drag and drop the highlighted text from the PDF to the destination doc?
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. And yes, it is for free. Try it out 🙂
The best way is to use Automator to create an application (not a workflow) that will extract text from the (unlocked) PDF.
I mention the fact that the PDF must be unlocked (as in, not a scanned paper you saved as PDF), because you would then have to use some OCR software to extract text from the picture your scanned document as PDF actually is.
Hi there,
I'm having the same problems. In spite of the fact that Automator now has the option of extracting highlights. All I get is a list of pages where highlights are, followed by hyphens. There's an app available in the App Store called "highlights app" which just does the job, but it costs 29.99€. I don't get why Apple's preview and Automator can't do the same thing...
Anyone any idea?
You might want to consider starting a new discussion. Since this one is a couple of years old, less people are likely to look at it. A new post would be much more visible. You can link to this one.
How to extract highlight text from pdf and save it to a document with Automator?
