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.
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.
If the goal is simply to extract the annotations from an existing PDF, there is another option you may want to try:
pdfannotations. com
PDFAnnotations extracts highlights, underlines, comments, and other PDF annotations and can export them to Markdown, TXT, CSV, JSON, Excel, Notion, or Obsidian.
It runs locally in the browser, so the PDF itself doesn’t need to be uploaded.
It also supports XFDF/FDF workflows, which may be useful when you want to keep the annotations separate from the original PDF.
It won’t replace Okular as a PDF reader, but it may be useful for the “annotate in Okular → extract/export annotations” part of the workflow.