My personal favorite on Windows PCs is PDF-XChange Editor (formerly Viewer), which does allow text export of annotations, albeit in a less ideal form.Īs a PDf sample, I have added the free psychology text book by Openstax College to Zotero.

You can, however, use any PDF reader that includes annotating tools. Consequently, in this post I am focusing on Acrobat Reader DC. Legewie for programming and maintaining this excellent cannot-live-without add-on!Īdobe’s free Acrobat Reader DC is the most popular PDF reader it is available on all major platforms, and allows you to highlight and annotate PDF documents. Zotfile was created by Joscha Legewie, a professor at New York University. To extract and manage PDF annotations in Zotero, you additionally need the free add-on Zotfile from. 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 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). Unsurprisingly, the free version of Acrobat Reader doesn’t allow the export of annotations as a word or text file. 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. But, you don’t want these annotations to remain “imprisoned” in your PDF. Ideally highlights and comments should contain back-links that take you right back to the correct page in the PDF source document.Īdobe’s Acrobat Reader DC, PDF-XChange Editor, and various other PDF readers allow you to annotate PDF files. An efficient workflow for annotating PDFs, extracting highlights and comments, and filing them is essential for research, writing, and studying.

Remove highlights from pdf