A researcher annotates a 180-page academic paper over several weeks. Highlights mark key passages. Sticky notes capture questions and connections to other sources. When it comes time to write the literature review, collecting all of those annotations into one usable list means scrolling through every page, copying each note manually. That process takes longer than the original reading.
Legal reviewers run into the same wall. A lawyer marks up a 60-page contract with 40 comments flagging issues for the client. Getting those into a structured issue list for a meeting requires manually copying every annotation in Acrobat, which the free Reader cannot do at all. This tool reads the annotation dictionary of any PDF directly in the browser, pulls every sticky note, highlight, and freetext entry with its page number, and exports the result as CSV or JSON. Nothing is uploaded to any server.
How It Works
- Upload your annotated PDF by dragging it onto the upload area or clicking to browse. The tool reads the document structure in the browser and shows page count and file size. A page preview panel lets you navigate through the document before running the extraction.
- Configure extraction settings by selecting which annotation types to include: All Types, Text/Sticky Notes only, Highlights only, or FreeText only. Choose between All Pages or Current Page scope. Toggle Include Empty Annotations if you want to surface annotation objects that have no text content. Statistics update before extraction: Total, Text, Highlight, and Pages with annotations counts.
- Extract and export by clicking Extract Annotations. The tool parses the PDF annotation dictionary and produces a structured list of every annotation with its page number, type, and text content. Click any annotation in the results list to jump to that location in the document preview. Copy the full list to clipboard, or download as CSV (for spreadsheet analysis) or JSON (for developer pipelines). Download the file immediately after extraction completes.
Compatibility & Support
Supported Input → Output Formats
- Input: PDF files containing annotation objects (comments, highlights, freetext boxes added in Acrobat, Preview, or other standard PDF annotation tools)
- Annotation types extracted: Text/Sticky Notes, Highlights (with highlighted passage text), FreeText annotations
- Output formats: CSV (includes page number, type, and annotation text per row), JSON (structured annotation objects for developer use)
- Scope options: All Pages or Current Page
Unsupported Formats
Annotations drawn as visual ink or shape overlays without text content (arrows, boxes, free-draw strokes) produce empty annotation entries since they carry no text in the annotation dictionary. The Include Empty Annotations toggle surfaces these entries. Scanned PDFs with no annotation layer produce zero results since rasterized page images contain no structured annotation objects. Annotations stored in external FDF files linked to the PDF rather than embedded in the file itself may not be detected.
File Size Limits
All processing runs in-browser with no server upload, so no external file size cap applies. Documents with large numbers of annotations parse fully on modern browsers. Processing time scales with annotation count rather than file size, and even heavily annotated research papers complete extraction in under a second.
Who Should Use This Tool?
- Students: A student who annotated a research paper with 60 highlights and sticky notes can extract all of them into a CSV, then copy the annotation text column into their notes document as a structured literature summary without re-reading every page.
- Freelancers & Designers: A UX consultant whose client returned a website mockup PDF with 25 feedback comments can extract all annotations to a CSV, sort them by page number, and build a prioritized revision list for the project backlog in minutes.
- Office Professionals: A legal team reviewing a contract with 40 reviewer comments can extract every annotation to a structured CSV and build a consolidated issues list for the client meeting, rather than manually copying each comment from Acrobat.
- Developers: A developer processing peer review PDFs for an academic submission system can use JSON output to ingest annotation data, page numbers, and annotation types programmatically into a review management database or workflow tool.
Key Features
Here's what separates this tool from generic alternatives:
No Server Upload
Annotation parsing runs entirely in your browser. Confidential legal comments, internal document reviews, and research notes never transfer to any external server during extraction.
Three Annotation Type Filters
Extract all annotation types together, or isolate Text/Sticky Notes, Highlights, or FreeText individually. Filtering by type produces cleaner, more focused output when you only need one category of feedback from a document.
Page Numbers Included
Every extracted annotation includes its source page number in the CSV and JSON output. This is essential for referencing comments back to the document during review meetings, revision work, or legal proceedings.
Pre-Extraction Statistics
Total annotation count, text annotation count, highlight count, and pages with annotations display before extraction begins. Confirm what is in the document before downloading, and identify incomplete annotation sets from partially reviewed documents.
Click to Jump to Annotation
Click any annotation in the extracted results list to jump directly to that location in the document preview. Useful for verifying context or cross-referencing the annotation text with the surrounding passage before exporting.
CSV and JSON Export
CSV exports open directly in Excel or Google Sheets for sorting, filtering, and issue tracking. JSON output provides structured annotation objects for developers building review management tools or automated document processing pipelines.
Why This Tool Beats the Alternatives
- No account, email, or signup required at any point.
- No watermarks or usage limits applied to the exported data.
- No server upload; legal comments, confidential reviews, and personal research notes stay in the browser throughout extraction.
- Three annotation type filters in a single tool rather than extracting all types with no way to separate them.
- Page numbers included in every export row, which many basic annotation extractors omit.
- JSON output alongside CSV, covering both spreadsheet users and developer workflows in one tool.
Pro Tips
- For academic research workflows, use the Highlights type filter to extract only highlighted passages, then sort the CSV by page number in Excel or Google Sheets. This produces a clean chronological reading list of the key passages you marked, without sticky note commentary cluttering the output. Run a second extraction with Text/Sticky Notes only to get your comments separately.
- When reviewing a document with multiple annotators, check the JSON output rather than the CSV. JSON includes the full annotation object which may contain author metadata when the annotation was made in a named Acrobat session. This lets you identify which reviewer left which comment in collaborative review documents.
- If you plan to share the annotated PDF after extraction, use the Flatten PDF tool on the same file to merge all annotations permanently into the page content. This prevents annotations from disappearing or rendering incorrectly in PDF viewers that do not fully support the annotation layer.
Upload your annotated PDF, choose your annotation type filter, and export your comments and highlights as CSV or JSON in seconds. For extracting the underlying form data from a fillable PDF rather than reviewer annotations, the Extract Form Data from PDF tool handles that in the same browser-based workflow.