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David Cornwell
David Cornwell
Participating Frequently
June 30, 2021
Question

Accessing comments/annotations via API

  • June 30, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 2784 views

Hi,

I'm new to the Document Services API and am trying to work out if the following is possible.  I would like to be able to access the comments/annotations of a PDF file via an API.  

 

The following documentation is for the REST query that should extract the contents of the file, but I'm unclear whether this will include annotations or not.  From the reading I've done, it looks like the annotations/comments are not available.

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/document-services/index.html#post-extractPDF

 

Can anyone kindly advise if I'm looking in the right area, or how else I can do this using REST API?  I'm unable to install any Python/Java etc, which is often the solution I've seen when googling.

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Regards, David.

    1 reply

    Joel Geraci
    Community Expert
    Joel GeraciCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 30, 2021

    Currently, Extract API only extracts the text on the page. It does not extract annotations, form field data, or any other PDF "widgets".

    However, we are always looking to improve the product. What would extracting comments let you do? How would you expect it to work? Your input would be appreciated.

    David Cornwell
    David CornwellAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    June 30, 2021

    Thank you for the info, Joel.

     

    We were looking to be able to monitor for annotations (comments) being added to documents, and notifying / passing through those comments to users in another system (Adobe Workfront). 

     

    I see that there are a number of desktop oriented products which allow you to extract annotations from PDFs so presumably there's a way we could try and read the file ourself to get them out, but it might be useful if the API allowed for it.  Keen to hear your suggestions if there's a better way?  


    Thanks you.

    Joel Geraci
    Community Expert
    Joel GeraciCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 30, 2021

    Oh... Perfect!

    Take a look at our Embed API. It has an API to manage annotations including callbacks for when annotations are added to a PDF.

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