Extract native PDF highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, notes, drawings, shapes, callouts and stamps locally in your browser, then search, filter and export annotation data.

Free PDF Annotation Extractor & Exporter extracts native PDF annotations locally in the browser, including highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, text notes, drawings, shapes, callouts and stamps where the PDF exposes them. Search, filter, sort and export the extracted records without uploading the document.

What Is a PDF Annotation Extractor?

This tool reads annotation objects exposed by the PDF format and PDF.js. The available metadata depends on how the PDF was created and saved. Flattened annotations that are only pixels are not native PDF objects, so the tool distinguishes those from its optional best-effort visual highlight scan.

How to Extract PDF Annotations

1. Upload or drag a PDF into the tool.
2. Use page navigation, thumbnails, zoom, rotate and fullscreen controls to inspect the document.
3. Select Extract Annotations to collect native annotation records.
4. Search or filter by type, page, author or color and click a record to jump to its page location.
5. Export the filtered annotation set to TXT, CSV, JSON, XLSX, HTML or Markdown, or generate a PDF report.

Privacy

The PDF bytes are processed in the browser. The tool does not upload the PDF to a server. For security and performance, very large files may be rejected by the browser-side safety limit shown in the interface.

Supported Annotation Types

Common native markup types include highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, squiggly underlines, text notes, ink drawings, squares, circles, polygons, polylines, lines, stamps and other annotation objects exposed by the PDF engine.

Scanned or Flattened PDFs

Scanned pages and flattened highlights may have no native annotation metadata. The optional visual-highlights action is a best-effort image analysis and is clearly labeled as visual detection rather than native annotation extraction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the tool upload my PDF?

No. The intended workflow is local browser processing.

Can every PDF annotation be extracted?

No PDF utility can guarantee every producer-specific object or flattened mark. Native metadata is extracted when exposed by the PDF engine; unavailable metadata is left blank rather than invented.

Can I download the annotated PDF?

Yes. The original PDF can be downloaded with its existing annotations preserved. The extractor itself does not rewrite or remove those annotations.