PDF annotations and comments are not indexed

Hello,

I’m adding annotation to the PDF with “Adobe Acrobat Reader DC”, mainly comments and highlights but I also “text box”.

The things is those annotation don’t seem to be indexed even they are readable from any PDF reader (Preview, DEVONThink integrated PDF reader, …)

I would like:

  • comment, annotation and any text added to a PDF should be indexed
  • highlighted words should perhaps have a stronger weight in the search engine (not sure this is very useful).

I’m not adding file in the DEVONThink database, only index theme.

Can I do that?

Currently, no. Annotations are not indexed / searchable. Note: Neither are they in Preview.
This may be part of future releases.

That’d be nice.

Declan

A second request for this. I’m reading a lot of long pdfs when doing research, using the highlighter to mark important passages. Having the possibility to limit search to just highlighted text would make the search functionality a whole lot more useful, since it would narrow down whats shown in the result.

As a work-around, I’m trying to use Highlights to create html-documents with my annotations and store them in Devonthink. It works ok, but adds extra work.