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Participant
April 6, 2025
Answered

Extracting Highights in 2025 with AI

  • April 6, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 482 views

For years I have been interested in extracting highlights from Acrobat PDF.

 

In 2012 I bought a script from try67.

 

Then later, when I moved up to XI Pro, I use the free Create Comment Summary Action Wizard.

 

But now it is 2025. Is there a way to do this with AI? When I put a PDF into ChatGPT, and ask for "highlights" it gives me a summary. Is there some ChatGPT prompt, or Copilot, that would find the text that is highlighted and pull it out. It seems like AI should be able to do those things!

Correct answer PDFLearner2222

I am the OP, but my OP was accidentially on my work account.

I figured out the perfect prompt for ChatGPT to extract highlights, assuming you have the setting to copy highlights to comments. Here it is:

Please extract the comments from this PDF document, preserving the visual order in which they appear in the document (not the date or author order).
Do not include page numbers or commenter names.
If the comments are presented with bullet points, preserve the original bulleting.
Do not add any numbering to the comments.

If a single sentence is broken into multiple sticky notes (for example, across a page break), please stitch the fragments back together into a complete sentence
If any comment appears to be a section title (typically 4+ words starting with a capital letter or in all caps), please bold that text.

Instead of generating a Word document, output the full results here as text with actual bold formatting (not asterisks) for any section titles, and preserve all bullet points as plain text bullets. This ensures the formatting stays intact when pasted into Evernote.


I like this better than the fee Create Comment Summary Action Wizard because that often distorts characters and loses formatting. 

Hope others can make use of this!

2 replies

PDFLearner2222Correct answer
Inspiring
May 26, 2025

I am the OP, but my OP was accidentially on my work account.

I figured out the perfect prompt for ChatGPT to extract highlights, assuming you have the setting to copy highlights to comments. Here it is:

Please extract the comments from this PDF document, preserving the visual order in which they appear in the document (not the date or author order).
Do not include page numbers or commenter names.
If the comments are presented with bullet points, preserve the original bulleting.
Do not add any numbering to the comments.

If a single sentence is broken into multiple sticky notes (for example, across a page break), please stitch the fragments back together into a complete sentence
If any comment appears to be a section title (typically 4+ words starting with a capital letter or in all caps), please bold that text.

Instead of generating a Word document, output the full results here as text with actual bold formatting (not asterisks) for any section titles, and preserve all bullet points as plain text bullets. This ensures the formatting stays intact when pasted into Evernote.


I like this better than the fee Create Comment Summary Action Wizard because that often distorts characters and loses formatting. 

Hope others can make use of this!

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 6, 2025

My script should still work... Just saying. 😄

Participant
April 8, 2025

But in today's day and age of all the "magic" ChatGPT can do, it seems like there would be some perfect prompt!