pdfcomments: extract comments from PDF

pdfcomments extracts comments from a PDF and puts them in a text file. It is most useful for turning text comments and sticky notes into a list of comments with page numbers.

By default, all comments are minor. You can specify a major comment by adding an asterisk at its beginning.

Example output

Say you have test.pdf and you add the following comments with Acrobat Reader, PDFExpert, or your annotation tool of choice:

• page 1: a text comment, Text is unclear.
• page 2: a sticky note, Sticky note.
• page 2: a text comment, * Important comment.

Run pdfcomments test.pdf and it will produce the following output file test.txt:

Major comments:

p2: Important comment.

Minor comments:

p1: Text is unclear.
p2: Sticky note.

Prerequisites

• Python >=3.6
• PyPDF2 (installed automatically by pip)

Installation

python -m pip install pdfcomments

Replace python with whatever command runs a version that is of Python 3.6 or greater.

Usage

usage: pdfcomments [-h] [--version] infile [outfile]

extract comments from PDF

positional arguments:
  infile      input PDF file
  outfile     output text file (default: infile with extension changed to 'txt')

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --version   show program's version number and exit

License

GNU General Public License v3.

Support

You are welcome to post issues but no guarantee of support is provided. Pull requests are welcome.