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Extract highlights, underlines and annotations from your PDFs into Obsidian

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akaalias/obsidian-extract-pdf-highlights

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Extract your PDF text-highlights into Obsidian

This plugin allows you to extract highlighted and underlined text from your PDFs into a markdown file in your Obsidian vault.

How it works

After you've installed and activated the plugin:

  1. Drop your highlighted PDF into your Obsidian vault
  2. Open the PDF in Obsidian
  3. Click the "PDF" icon in the left sidebar

Demo with default settings

Simple

Demo with all optional settings turned on

Settings

Optional settings

  • Include page number (Default: off)
  • Include highlight color (Default: off)
  • Create links (Default: off)

Backlog

The list of features and improvements for this plugin.

ICEBOX

  • Record demo video, quick-start walk-through for new users

TODO

  • Auto-create notes from links with highlight/annotation as quote with backlink to source PDF
  • Group highlights by highlight color (Optional)
  • Add progress bar/modal to show "Processed Page 5/10 (50%)" or similar for longer PDFs
  • Fix missing space after newline (Very complex)

DOING

...

DONE

  • Refactor pdfjs import to not overload Obsidian worker (Ideas from @lishid?)
  • Show highlight color (Optional)
  • Auto-link list items (Optional)
  • Refactor/extract PDF from main.ts
  • Add Page-number to each highlight (Optional)
  • Sort highlights by position in document and page (Mandatory)
  • Extract unsorted list of HIGHLIGHT annotations
  • Extract unsorted list of TEXT annotations
  • Extract unsorted list of UNDERLINE annotations
  • Decide if to integrate with existing Highlights Plugin

Contribute

I'd love to hear from you, so please check out the Contribution page to get in touch!

Major Thanks

This plugin stands on the shoulders of Joseph Devietti and his 2012 pull-request for PDFJS.