Feature request: Export all pdf annotations into a file

Brainstorm
1

Would it be possible to add an “export all annotations to file” option? I think the software is amazing and I think it would benefit users to have this option.

For context, I use large PDFs of textbooks daily and it’s an important part of my workflow to export highlighted texts.

I have spent many hours looking for a solution to this problem. I have tried pdfannots python library on github, but it’s kinda slow and not perfect at rendering the bounding boxes. Okular already does this perfectly. I tried zotero but it struggles opening large PDFs.

This option existed before in okular but a change in 2017 made it so that the annotations are stored within the pdf file itself. I think this change would be a welcome one to users who need to export their annotations.

I would do it myself but I dont know where to begin.

Thank you so much

2

I agree, this is one of the missing features that has kept me from adopting Okular as my daily PDF reader and annotator.

There is a related discussion in post #10856 (sorry I can’t post links).

The file format should be FDF like Acrobat and other programs use (defined in 12.7.8 of the ISO/DIS 32000-2 standard). Very useful when you want to send someone just the annotations instead of the whole PDF when it is tens or hundreds of MB in size.