Overview
Export Highlights to CSV writes every text highlight in the active PDF to a CSV file — the highlighted text itself, plus who made it, when, and where it sits on the page. It is the way to get a document's markup into a spreadsheet for review, and the file it writes can be read back by Import Highlights from CSV.
The PDF is not changed, and no highlights are removed.
How to use
- Open the highlighted PDF.
- Go to Plug-Ins > Highlights > Export Highlights to CSV.
- Choose a name and location for the
.csvfile. - Click Save.
File format
The first line is a header row. The columns are:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Record | A sequence number for the row. |
| Page | 1-based page number. |
| Text | The highlighted text, read from the page. |
| Comment | The note attached to the highlight, if any. |
| Author | The name recorded against the annotation. |
| Type | The annotation subtype. |
| Color | The highlight colour. |
| Created | The creation date held in the annotation. |
| Rect | The bounding rectangle in PDF points. |
| QuadPoints | The individual quadrilaterals the highlight covers — more than one when a highlight wraps across lines. |
The file is written as UTF-8 with a byte order mark, so highlighted text, comments and author names in any language open correctly in Excel and come back unchanged through Import Highlights from CSV.
Tip
Import only needs Page, Text and Rect, and ignores the rest, so a file exported here can be trimmed in a spreadsheet and still import cleanly.