Annotation → Markdown Workflow Help?

Good to know. I’m not on the beta but that’s useful.

Highlights can do that too on iPad but I haven’t played with setting it up to go directly into Obsidian yet. I can get text from Ggoodnotes out that way via a shortcut. I think I can eventually do the same from Highlights.

I like it better than PDF expert for annotations because it just seems tohave more optionsn colors and work better with the Apple pencil on my ipad. I use nboth it and PDF Expert on the Mac.

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No doubt true but PDF Expert is cheaper. :grinning:

PDF expert on Mac is not free if I recall to export to markdown, and it isn’t supported on iOS. iOS will export the annotations however, and with a simple shortcut you can take the text from pdf and copy to clipboard and then paste into obsidian.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a1d5961971b74527a3c3f3234f2228df

This gets you essentially the same output for free and more importantly from the iPad without having to pay for highlights. It’s not too bad on formatting, just a quick clean up occasionally
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PDF Expert is not free but it is not a subscription. :grinning: You are correct, MD extraction is not possible in iOS.

I love your shortcut, I really need to learn how to build them! I noticed, however, that the shortcut does not extract just annotated text–which is what many of us want. It extracts all of the text on the page. Is there a way to change this to extract only highlighted text and notes?

Shortcut executed on the iPad using PDF Expert:

I have not the slightest idea….I’m a simple shortcut maker only! But I like the title and that is part of the quick clean up I do to arrange things. For me I prefer to actively look back and cull as much as I can so it’s an active process anyway.

Essentially all it’s doing is copy and paste a pdf……so you can just pull up the pdf on iPad and copy the parts you want and paste it I suppose. This is just a quicker way to dump all the text elsewhere without all the manual selecting.

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As I think about this, your shortcut is a very nice complement to my workflow. I use the Markdownload Safari extension to convert webpage articles to Markdown. Now, with your shortcut I can easily do the same with PDF’s on my iPad. On the Mac I use DEVONthink to convert files, including PDFs, to MD.

Thanks for sharing the shortcut!