How to bulk copy and paste highlights taken on Adobe Reader

[ryan_1857]

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?

[Thom Parker]

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

[ryan_1857]

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]

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);
}

  

[try67]

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

[Thom Parker · Accepted solution]

@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. 

[try67]

I learned it the hard way, too. I also assumed it would be in Reader. Doesn't make sense not to include such a basic (yet useful) feature...