Q: Extracting PDF highlights with Automator

Hi there,

I'm having difficulties with extracting highlighted text from PDFs using Automator, in spite of the fact that Automator offers such option. All I get is a list of pages where highlights are, followed by hyphens. I searched various forums and this seems to be a common problem. I tried to use Skim, but it's only extracting some of the highlights, not all of them, so not reliable enough for academic research.

There's an app available in the App Store called "highlights app" which seems to do the job pretty competently, but it costs 29.99€. I don't get why Apple's Preview and Automator can't do the same thing... Anyone any idea?

Mac OS 10.11.6