PDFAnnotations
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PDFAnnotations.com is a privacy-first, and browser-local web utility designed to extract highlights, comments, notes, and drawings from PDF files. It formats and exports this extracted data directly into structured notes for personal knowledge management (PKM) tools like Obsidian and Notion, as well as standard formats like Markdown, CSV, JSON, and plain text.
Unlike cloud-based extraction services, PDFAnnotations operates entirely on the client side. This means your PDF documents never leave your computer, allowing you to use the tool completely offline with absolute data privacy.
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PDFAnnotations PDF ExpertPDF Expert is recommended for students, professionals, lawyers, and anyone who regularly interacts with PDF documents and needs a reliable tool for editing, annotating, and managing these files efficiently.
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PDFAnnotations's answer
PDFAnnotations is unique because it operates 100% locally in the user's browser using WebAssembly. Unlike traditional extractors that require uploading sensitive documents to cloud servers, PDFAnnotations parses files completely offline. It also features a visual, interactive Template Designer that allows active readers to format their extracted highlights into custom native Markdown, Obsidian Callouts, or Notion blocks with complete metadata preservation.
PDFAnnotations's answer
A user should choose PDFAnnotations over competitors due to three key advantages: absolute data privacy, extreme cost efficiency, and deep note-taking integration. It requires no signup, no subscriptions, and no file uploads, serving as a robust free/freemium alternative to expensive cloud sync services like Readwise. Additionally, its "Sentence Mode" context preservation, multi-level comment reply extraction, and highly customizable formatting templates are specifically optimized for modern knowledge workers, which generic PDF readers do not support.
PDFAnnotations's answer
The primary audience of PDFAnnotations consists of students, researchers, academics, legal professionals, and digital note-takers (PKM enthusiasts). It is designed specifically for active readers who frequently annotate academic papers, textbook PDFs, or legal contracts, and need a frictionless, secure way to move those highlighted concepts and reviewer comments into structured personal knowledge bases like Obsidian, Notion, or Logseq.
PDFAnnotations's answer
PDFAnnotations was born out of frustration. As researchers and avid readers, we found ourselves spending hours manually copying and pasting highlighted quotes and comments from PDF textbooks and research papers into our note-taking apps. Existing cloud-based tools either required expensive monthly subscriptions or forced us to upload confidential PDFs to external servers, violating our data privacy requirements. We decided to build a lightweight, browser-local, WebAssembly-powered tool that solves this friction instantly with zero security risks.
PDFAnnotations's answer
HTML5, TypeScript, WebAssembly (WASM) for lightning-fast client-side PDF parsing, and Tailwind CSS.
PDFAnnotations's answer
Based on our record, PDF Expert seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 25 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
I work a lot with academic papers on iPad and PDF expert is the best! https://pdfexpert.com/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
Honestly, preview does everything you mentioned, and it's pretty good at that! For a paid alternative, you can check out pdfexpert. It has a lifetime purchase option though it's a bit pricey. Source: about 3 years ago
I just took a look at the lifetime deal as available on pdfexpert.com, it shows amongst other:. Source: over 3 years ago
I don't know if it does everything you need, but you can check out PDF Expert, which is available on both macOS and iOS/iPadOS. Source: over 3 years ago
For anyone who draws, absolutely. I even use Procreate for brainstorming sometimes, because it's so much faster and more intuitive than any other app I've used. Another thing that IMO is way better on iPad/Pencil is PDF editing and annotation. I happily pay for a subscription to PDF Expert[0] and I just use it for school. [0]: https://pdfexpert.com. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
Sumnotes - Export highlights from PDFs
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PdfHighlights - PdfHighlights extracts and exports all your PDF highlights and PDF annotations from all your PDF files into a single report.
iLovePDF - Premium online PDF tool set
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