How to Create, Extract, and Manage PDF Annotations and Highlights

An efficient workflow for annotating PDFs, extracting highlights and comments, and filing them is essential for research, writing, and studying. Ideally highlights and comments should contain back-links that take you right back to the correct page in the PDF source document.Extracted-PDF-Annotations

Adobe’s Acrobat Reader DC, PDF-XChange Editor, and various other PDF readers allow you to annotate PDF files. But, you don’t want these annotations to remain “imprisoned” in your PDF. Your highlights and comments become a lot more useful if you can extract them, aggregate markups from several documents, and re-find them when you need them. Unsurprisingly, the free version of Acrobat Reader doesn’t allow the export of annotations as a word or text file.

To accomplish this in an elegant way, I recommend that you manage your PDF documents in Zotero, a free, open-source research document management system created and maintained by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media     (George Mason University). With Zotero, you can collect and organize a large variety of document types, including PDF documents and web pages with the click of a few buttons.
To extract and manage PDF annotations in Zotero, you additionally need the free add-on Zotfile from zotfile.com. Zotfile was created by Joscha Legewie, a professor at New York University. A big thank you to Dr. Legewie for programming and maintaining this excellent cannot-live-without add-on!

Read moreHow to Create, Extract, and Manage PDF Annotations and Highlights

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