Export Highlights as Text
Pull every Highlight annotation out of a PDF and write them as a plain-text list — page, location, author, and any attached comment.
1. Upload your file
How does the Export Highlights as Text work?
Extract every Highlight annotation from a PDF and write a plain-text summary, one line per highlight, grouped by page. Each line shows the author plus any comment attached to the highlight (Adobe Reader and Preview let users add a popup comment to a highlight; this exposes it). Useful for review summaries, study notes from highlighted PDFs, or extracting "key passages" from a marked-up document. Limitation: this v1 does not extract the underlying text the highlight covers — only the rect coords and any author-added comment. Underlying-text extraction requires text-position introspection and is on the roadmap.
🔒 Security & Privacy
All processing happens on your device. Your files never leave your browser, never touch our servers, and are not stored anywhere. Close the tab and the file is gone.
📱 Use it on any device
Works in any modern browser — Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, and tablets. No installation, no app to download. Just open the page and start.
⚡ Quick & easy
Drag, drop, click. Most files process in seconds, not minutes. No watermarks added to your output, no per-day limits, and the tool always shows the result before asking you to download.
🎁 Always free, no signup
Free to use, every time. No account creation, no email required, no “trial” that converts to a paid plan. We make money from ads so you don’t have to pay.
Frequently asked
For heavier PDF workflows
Amazon affiliateAs an Amazon Associate we may earn from qualifying purchases. This does not add cost for you.
Related PDF tools
More tools you might like
Hand-picked tools that pair well with this one — same audience, same intent.
Walk a PDF's page Annots dictionaries and export every annotation (highlight / note / link) to a CSV — for review tracking or migration.
Walk a PDF's page Annots dictionaries and export every annotation to a JSON file — for tooling, migration, or programmatic processing.
Pull every comment annotation (Text / FreeText / Popup) out of a PDF and write them as a threaded conversation — replies grouped under their parent.
Apply yellow (or coloured) highlight rectangles to PDF pages — drag on the page to mark each line of text you want highlighted.
Paste any plain text and download it as a clean, paginated PDF — preserves line breaks, no formatting needed.
Extract plain text from a scanned PDF — runs OCR server-side, then pulls the recognised text out as a .txt file (no PDF output).
Extract every page's text into its own .txt file and bundle them in a ZIP — easier to grep, ingest into pipelines, or hand-process page-by-page than a single concatenated file.
Build the canonical text payload encoded in a QR code — plain text, URL, WiFi-network credentials, or vCard contact. Includes a ready-to-render image URL for visual scanning.
Related guides
Long-form editorial covering the topics behind our tools.
- Best Free Online PDF Tools in 2026Comparing SMT to Smallpdf, iLovePDF, PDF2Go on price, privacy, and speed.
- Free Adobe Acrobat Alternatives (2026)What Acrobat does, what you actually need, and which free tools cover 90% of it.
- How to merge PDF files for free in 2026Client-side merging without upload, size limit, or signup.
- How to compress PDF files for free in 2026Size reduction techniques and when quality vs size matters.