extract-pdf-highlighted-text

Extract text that has been highlighted in PDF documents.

How it works

• Locates all highlight annotations in each page using PyPDF2.
• Computes the bounding boxes of each highlight annotation.
• Uses pdfminer.six to determine locations of all visible characters on the page.
• For each annotation, matches the characters whose bounding boxes overlap the annotation's bounding box (using IoU).
• Groups and prints out the highlighted text in reading order.

Installation

pip install extract-pdf-highlighted-text

After installation, run it as extract_pdf_highlighted_text.

Dependencies:

• PyPDF2 (for annotation geometry)
• pdfminer.six (for text locations)

Usage

extract_pdf_highlighted_text your_file.pdf

The script will print each extracted highlight in reading order.

Example Output

This is a highlighted passage.

Another highlighted bit here.

Limitations

• Does not support image-based PDFs (no OCR).
• Precision may depend on PDF quality and producer.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please submit pull requests or open issues on the GitHub repository.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.