Copy Highlighted Text in Pdf file

Highlights don't belong to text in PDF, they are just a box in the same place. So I imagine some kind of anchored graphic.

I figured I would be able to export to word and then use the highlight there to isolate my results. I'm frustrated to note that underline comes out as a true underline, but the highlight is not a true - searchable - highlight. This leaves me with two options:

1) can I turn all highlights in PDF into underline (I think not)

2) what is the status of the yellow highlight which comes to word - what kind of item is it? I can't figure this out either. Thoughts, hivemind?

With the latest April 2017 release of Acrobat DC, you can follow these steps to copy highlighted text:-

(1) Right-click the highlighted text, and then choose Enable Text Selection.

(2) Select the text from highlight that you want to copy, right-click, and then choose Copy.

Hi Sleighon,

Probably you can try this:

Right click on your highlighted text, Use ‘Enable Text Selection’. Then you can copy the text the normal way

Worked for me. I hope it works for you too.

no need to select outside what you highlighted as I read on other replies, you just have to hold shift and select, that is it.

Both the read mode Cmd + Ctrl + H as well as the Shift + Alt + Drag-select work arounds are superb.

However, I logged in specifically to state that this is still the pinnacle of bad UX I have yet encountered in Acrobat and the fact that this goes unaddressed by Adobe is outrageous.

It's possible that as of September 12, 2016, a full five years after the original post, that Adobe has finally fixed this with its latest update.  Some of the confusion for me stemmed from responses 10 through 13 or so. The steps I take:

Click anywhere on document outside of highlighted text.

Right click, then check "Select Tool"

Shift click within the highlighted area and select your text.  It's twitchy - not precise.  Might at first select the whole goddamn paragraph, but try again - a little futzing, you can grab what you need. 

Edit - Copy or Control C

Paste the text into your document, onto your wall, onto your forehead, wherever. 

Sincerely hope this helps someone, somewhere in time. 

I can't believe that no one answered this yet in almost 4 years. I guess we are basically without any REAL support here. You can hold down the SHIFT key and select but the selection is uncontrollable. I  tried using tex23's ALT-SHIFT but on the OCRed document I am using, it selects random groups of letters column-wise. HUH?!

The correct solution, that is somewhat of a kludge, not to mention a PITA, is to temporarily turn off highlighting via a keyboard shortcut (OS X--can't find ones for 'Doze, sorry):

    CMD-SHIFT-8

Now isn't that an intuitive shortcut? Now you can select down to the letter.

To turn highlighting back on:

    CMD-8

That's it… Simple enough but it really shouldn't be required. Then again, I find all of Adobe's user interfaces seriously lacking. They apparently don't have human factors engineers or test their products with REAL users. For what they charge, that is unforgivable.

UPDATE:

I hadn't seen the answer given by cryptdecrypt, which is to enter Read Mode, whatever that is. This is even better than toggling highlighting on/off and requires one shortcut, but two actual key events for on then off:

    Ctrl-CMD-H (OS X)

    Ctrl-H ('Doze)

What's better about this solution is it allows you to select as usual within the highlighted section without turning highlighting off. This way you don't have to keep toggling highlighting on/off many times while you navigate to highlighted sections and select text. You can leave Read Mode on until you want to highlight a new section, bookmark, etc.

This is 100% non-intuitive and should not be required at all.

Yes! Please Adobe, your software is awesome except for this unfortunate flaw. When researching I like to read through a document and highlight particular passages of importance.. but when it comes to compiling my research by copying and pasting the highlighted passages in to a word document, I have no other option but to go back through and manually highlight those same passages from outside of the already specified highlighted area and manually delete what is not needed. It seems counter intuitive that parts of the text that are flagged as important aren't immediately easy to copy and paste?

I am on a mac. tex23's solution is good but not perfect. If you just hold shift while clicking, it highlights all of the highlighted text at once.