Hi Alexis, Hope you’re well and thanks for the Wonderfull soft you’re delivering. I used in March the “extra pdf highlights” and it worked well, but now it’s not working . Please can you help me ? certainly I am doing something wrong… Thanks in advance for your help. Cheers, Paul
Hi there. Great plug in!
I’m using it to make a quick summary of large chunks of text, but i didn’t find the possibility to include the title of the paragraph (not of the entire note) above the highlighted text, even if isn’t highlighted.
Example
Paragraph 1
Bla bla ==bla==
Paragraph 2
text =text= text
Outcome:
Paragraph 1
- bla
Paragraph 2
- text
I didn’t find any way to do this in the options, but i think is an essential option to preserve the structure of your note.
Hello! I love your plug-in for Obsidian. I use it as an easy way to grab text and summarize my highlights. I wanted to know if “extract highlights” could add to a “highlights” file as I continue to work through a document that is too large for me to read in one sitting.
My process: I read some text in a file. I highlighted sections of text. I extracted higlights. A new document with my highlights was created. I went back to the original file and highlighted some more. I extracted highlights. Nothing happened. The new highlights weren’t weren’t dropped into the highlights file. However, I discovered that I could delete the highlights file and then the extract process would be successful and create a new highlights file. BUT I don’t want to do that because I like to make my own comments on the highlights file.
Example of the Feature that Interests Me
You might find the functionality you want with the Note refactor plugin. It does many things, but one of them would be to copy text selections into another note. It could be a new note that you copy to, or an existing one.
If you have Alfred, you can use a workflow to wrap the selected text in <mark></mark> with a hotkey.
It would be great if we had more control of the output. I’d like to not have the pulled highlights as a series of bulleted items, but just text with newlines.
Thank you for your enthusiastic efforts.
Can you add a new feature.
1、After highlighting a sentence, at the end of this paragraph, add a custom opening block reference mark, for example: ^ffxxx;(ff is a custom field,xxx is a random 3~4 numbers)
2. copy all the block references with ^ffxxx in the article with one click, and combine them into [[article title #^ffxxx]] to facilitate copying to the beginning of the article.
3, if possible, made similar to the form of “TASKS” plug-in, just a small piece of code can be automatically generated at the beginning of the article; for example, enter a small piece of code, you can automatically generate the highlighted block quote for this article 
:
Highlights
The advantages of this are.
- many times the highlighted sentences will be modified in the future, and changes can be made in real time using block references.
2, the use of custom blockquote identification, easy to extract specific highlighted paragraphs; in addition, in other notes, if you want to quote the highlighted content of this article, just enter the article title ^ff can quickly find the highlighted paragraphs.
3, the combination of "article title #^^ffxxx is advantageous, in addition to convenient to copy to the beginning of the article, but also convenient to copy directly to other notes.
4, if the future can be real-time display of the highlighted block references, so that the future in the notes of the highlighted changes, or new highlighted sentences, can be automatically updated, will be very convenient.
For example
Edit View：
These are the highlighted passages in the article：
Does the plugin extrat PDF annotations yet ?
I checked the plugin, and it only extracts highlights. But my highlights are always with notes close to them in pdf.
1 Like
This looks like a really useful plugin, thanks for your efforts. I use a variety of PDF highlight extractors already, and it would be great to have this integrated into Obsidian.
Suggestion: Add the option of including the page header as well as the page # in the extracted highlight. This would mean e.g. that the chapter title or document heading of part of the PDF would be associated with the highlight, and would give it context. Personally I need this as I review large medical files with reports from various people, and this would help me associate the highlight with the relevant section.
Followup - I belatedly realized that I could simply highlight the header and achieve this result (of providing context to the highlighted passage).
New user here (Roam refugee). This is an fantastic plugin, thank you so much!!
Just wanted to share my use case and feature suggestion.
When I’m reading, I am usually reacting to the text on the go. So, when I highlight, I immediately want to write down my thoughts or arguments before moving on. If I wait until I’ve done all highlights and extracted, then I’ve forgotten all that juicy stuff.
So, my solution now is this: after highlighting a section of text, I add in a commented note just before the highlight wrapping mark. e.g.
==This is the author's highly provocative sentence.%%This is my immediate take on it.%%==
This way, once the highlights are exported, I have a series of highlights with my notes appended (snuck in?). Also, since my annotations are comments in the accepted Obsidian format, they don’t show if the original text is exported/viewed.
This in itself is enough, but I’ve also experimented with a few global text replacements on the resulting output to separate out my notes, i.e. removing the closing %% and replacing the leading %% with a newline-indent-bullet, so I get an extracted highlight like so:
- This is the author's highly provocative sentence.
- This is my immediate take on it.
It would be pretty cool if the plugin could do this for me, or allow me to specify opening and closing text strings to identify my notes (i.e. just put them on a new line after the highlight and let me specify text strings to replace the leading %% and closing %%). It might even be useful to be able to put the comment above the highlight, so that the highlight acts more as a kind of reference for the comment. e.g.
- This is my take.
- This is the author's highly provocative sentence.
In any case, thank you for your amazing work!
2 Likes
@akalias
First, thank you for this plugin, it saves me so much work with copying … 
I might be a little late for the party, but still I would like to propose 2 feature additions:
- Would it be possible to integrate different Hotkeys for
a) creating a Summary of an Article, Book, aso,
b) creating a MOC
c) creating a “Note Explosion”
Reason: All three lead to quite different working processes and goals. And they might even be useful in different ways on the same “base-text”. A Summary might be some kind of lecture note, in which one might add or link some terms or propositions for explanations. A MOC (in which you would have to rewrite the Note-Titles anyway) should be a GOTO-Place for certain contexts. And “atomizing” a text might be the starting point for rethinking and rewriting the content (as the Zettelkasten-method proposes).
In case making it three hotkeys is not feasible, there also is the user input option, where the plugin simply asks what it should do with the content:
a) create a Summary
b) create a MOC
c) Explode/Atomize the content (and create a MOC)
This might even be the better way to handle this.
- Would it be possible to associate the different options with different templates?
That would be really cool!
Anyways, thanks a lot for a really helpful plugin, that saver a lot of useful time and work!
Kudos!
1 Like
Somehow I never considered putting my comments inside the highlights! I’ve been putting them immediately after the highlight (these are mainly notes on my own in-progress work), but inside might be better. Thanks!
This plugin is super amazing and I just love your enthusiasm @akaalias ! I have noticed that my exported highlights are all truncated to what appears to be an equal line length. It’s tidy, but I can’t read all the highlights in the final file. I have to go back to the original document to read them. When I watch your demos, your full highlighted text shows up after pasting, even if it’s long. Am I doing something wrong?
Hi @akaalias, I really like the Extract Highlights plugin and it makes life more fun. I just had a question. Is it passable to format how the highlight will be created? I really want it to be compatible with my Templater template for the note. I want to extract the key topics from test questions and then do a key topic note. so I highlight the key topics, extract the topics and then want to go and edit them. I have a template I want to use for them. Is there a way to say to the template to add any existing text to specified place? That could solve my problem. Ether way. Compatibility with Templater plugin?
Thanks for reading creating this plugin and all your efforts to improve it.
This is one of my most favorite plugins for shredding large content. It simply does something uniquely useful. Not too many plugins still have that going for them after 2 + years and no updates. Cheers to @akaalias !
Hi @akaalias! Great plugin. I tried to get this to work with Highlightr which uses <mark tags for the highlights. I couldn’t extract these, but normal == highlighted == text works fine. Any insight as to why it’s not working?
Also, I’d love to extract the color of each highlight, as with your examples on the PDF highlight extractor. Any plans to build this into the markdown highlight extractor?
Thank you!
Hi @akaalias , Thanaks for the great plugin Extract Highlight. I’ve been using for almost a year.
I’m using wondering if we could have an option to include the Title (#, ## etc.) in the extraction. This help to include the chapter, section heading of the extracted text.
Thank you very much!
The info on the plugin says it extracts “== , ** and <mark></mark>” but I’m using the last one i.e.</mark… and it’s not working. Am I missing something?
How do you do this?