How to Extract PDF Annotations on iPhone

Download Highlights for free. Not on an iPhone? Checkout the Mac and iPad guides.

Highlights will extract annotations from any PDF document with standard embedded annotations when you open it. Annotations you make in Highlights will be extracted on the fly.

A PDF page from a scientific article with yellow highlighted text, an image and a table beamed out into individual elements.

All extracted annotations appear in your notes. By default annotations will be converted to notes using the following rules:

PDF Annotation

Note Element

Highlighted text

Quote

Underlined text

Bold quote

~~Strikethrough text~~

~~Strikethrough quote~~

Comments

PDF annotations can have comments, these appear in the text box of the annotation popover:

In your notes, these comments show up as regular text below their annotation.

Sticky Notes

Sticky notes are text annotations represented by an icon on the PDF page. The text content is added as a comment in the annotation popover and similarly to comments show up as regular text in notes. Their position in your notes is determined by their location on the page relative to other annotations.

Image selections

Image selections are square annotations in the PDF:

Image selection over an area of interest in the PDF

You can resize them using the blue drag handles. When finished resizing, the area inside the selection is added to your notes as an image.

Image selections can also be used to extract text and tables from PDFs.