Extracting Pdf Annotations/comments

We have a pretty complex print workflow where the controlling is adding comments and annotations for draft versions of generated PDF documents using Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat.

Solution 1:

This code should do the job. One of the answers to the question Parse annotations from a pdf was very helpful in getting me to write the code below. It uses the poppler library to parse the annotations. This is a link to annotations.pdf.

code

import poppler, os.pathpath = 'file://%s' % os.path.realpath('annotations.pdf')
doc = poppler.document_new_from_file(path, None)
pages = [doc.get_page(i) for i in range(doc.get_n_pages())]

for page_no, page in enumerate(pages):
    items = [i.annot.get_contents() for i in page.get_annot_mapping()]
    items = [i for i in items if i]
    print"page: %s comments: %s " % (page_no + 1, items)

output

page:1 comments: ['This is an annotation'] page:2 comments: [' Please note ', ' Please note ', 'This is a comment in the text'] 

installation

On Ubuntu the installation as as follows.

apt-get install python-poppler