Generating a summary of PDF annotations or comments?

[christineq]

I read a lot of 3-50 page pdfs for work. Interacting with the text (even electronically) helps me remember what I read, so I do lots of highlighting and underlining.

Searching for a pdf reader that, with a few mouse clicks or screen taps, can gather or extract these annotations and generate a summary - create a page (or two or three...) that copies and lists each section of text I've highlighted or underlined.

So instead of flipping back through a ~15 page document to refresh my memory on the key points of the piece, I'd have ~two pages showing the parts I had marked up as most important.

Adobe Acrobat's "Create Comment Summary" sounds promising, but doesn't function the way I describe above.

Has anyone else had this need and found a happy solution?

 

[Oogiem]

I'm not doing it within a PDF reader but instead doing it with a combination of apps. For scientific papers my main source of the papers is my Zotero system. I send the files tothe iPad for reading and annotation using Highlights. The annotations come back into Zotero and then head over to the Obsidian app which is where they live and get used and edited.

For more general PDFs I am using the same stack as I use for books and articles, Readwise Reader on iPad or Mac with a direct connection to Obsidian.

 

[jeffren]

I read a lot of 3-50 page pdfs for work. Interacting with the text (even electronically) helps me remember what I read, so I do lots of highlighting and underlining.

Searching for a pdf reader that, with a few mouse clicks or screen taps, can gather or extract these annotations and generate a summary - create a page (or two or three...) that copies and lists each section of text I've highlighted or underlined.

So instead of flipping back through a ~15 page document to refresh my memory on the key points of the piece, I'd have ~two pages showing the parts I had marked up as most important.

Adobe Acrobat's "Create Comment Summary" sounds promising, but doesn't function the way I describe above.

Has anyone else had this need and found a happy solution?

Hi Christineq, I have a shareware called AuroGrep which seems exactly to meet your requirement. It can list and search pdf text content, annotation, outline and document information with regular expression or literal text. It supports 16 types of annotations.
I'm not actively maintaining it for now but you still can find the version 1.2 from https://download.cnet.com/AuroGrep/3000-2351_4-78703986.html . You can give a try.

 

[christineq]

Thank you both for sharing these ideas to consider.

 

[shusuo]

From read the article from pctechtest and other site, One of the most effective tool to extract comments and summaries from a PDF document is the Wondershare PDFelement, which integrates the ChatGPT tool.

 

[DKPhoto]

If you’re on a Mac then i believe PDF Expert by Readdle will do this. You get a summary of the annotations in the side bar, and it’s this I think can be exported.

I’ve never tried it though.

 

[René Lie]

I haven't tried it myself, but could ChatPDF perhaps be an option..?