Tiny Online Tools
What comes out
This tool reads the annotation objects a PDF actually stores, not a rendered picture of them. For every comment it reports:
- Subtype — Text (sticky note), Highlight, Underline, StrikeOut, Squiggly, Square, Circle, Line, Polygon, Ink, FreeText, Stamp, FileAttachment.
- Author (
/T), subject (/Subj) and contents. - Created and modified dates, parsed from the
D:YYYYMMDDHHmmSS+HH'mm'form including the time-zone offset. A comment written at 09:15 in Stockholm is not the same instant as 09:15 UTC, and exports that drop the zone sort wrongly. - Colour (
/C) and interior colour (/IC), read as grey, RGB or CMYK depending on how many components the file gives, plus opacity (/CA). - Page, rectangle and flags, including the hidden flag.
Highlighted text, not just highlight boxes
For Highlight, Underline, StrikeOut and Squiggly the useful export is the text that was marked. The tool reads /QuadPoints — eight numbers per quad in upper-left, upper-right, lower-left, lower-right order, which is not the corner order of a rectangle — projects each quad through the page viewport, and keeps the words whose centre falls inside it. That is how a highlight export becomes a quote you can paste into a review.
Reply threads survive
/IRT says which annotation a comment replies to and /RT says how. Most extractors flatten this and you lose the conversation. Here every reply keeps its parent and every root shows how many replies it has, so a thread reads as a thread.
Filtering and export
Filter by type, by author, by page or by a word in the text, then export:
- CSV — one row per annotation, UTF-8 with a BOM so Excel reads accents correctly.
- JSON — everything, including geometry, for scripting.
- Markdown — a review summary grouped by author, in page order, quoting the covered text above each comment.
Limits
Overlay geometry is computed through the page viewport, so it is right on rotated pages; the text-under-highlight pass assumes an unrotated page. Popup windows (/Popup) are not listed separately — they are the note's window, not the note — but the parent is flagged as having one.
Privacy
The PDF is opened and read entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and no comment text leaves the page.