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Participant
October 15, 2024
Answered

How to bulk copy and paste highlights taken on Adobe Reader

  • October 15, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 1280 views

When I take highlights on Adobe Reader it just comes up as "Highlighted Text" in the review comments section and I can't copy my highlights to be pasted somewhere else. Is it even possible to bulk copy/paste highlights from pdfs from Adobe Reader and if not what can be used to do this?

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Correct answer Thom Parker

This setting doesn't exist in Reader, only in Acrobat.


@try67 , Thanks for catching that!! Bad assumption on my part 😞  Why would they do that?

 

So this complicates things, but doesn't make it impossible.  The solution is to search the text to match words with the highlight annotation quads, and that's outside the scope of this forum. 

1 reply

Thom Parker
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 15, 2024

Why do you want to copy highlights? Please explain what it is that you are trying to do. 

 

 

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often
ryan_1857Author
Participant
October 15, 2024

I have taken multiple highlights on a pdf, and I want to be able to paste all my highlights into OneNote from Adobe Reader.

Thom Parker
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 15, 2024

Ok, so there isn't a specific tool or direct path to copying the highlighted text to the system clipboard. But it is possible to write a script that collects the text and makes it available to copy.   But first, there is an Acrobat preference that must be set so that the highlighted text is available to the script.   It's shown on the image at the end of this post.

 

Here's the script, it assumes the highlighted text is coppied to the "content" property of the highlight annotation.  Run it in the console window.

 

var oAnnots = this.getAnnots();
if(oAnnots)
{
    var strHiLiteText = aAnnots.filter(function(oAnt){return oAnt.type == "Highlight";}).map(function(oAnt){return oAnt.contents;}).join("\n");
    console.println(strHiLiteText);
}

 

  

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often