Extract Text from Annotiations and corresponding highlighted Text

[M-M99]

Hello,

can somebody explain me how i can get the Text which is highlighted in the PDF.

I know, that i can get the annot Text with a loop over page.annot() / annot.getText.
But how i can get the corresponding Text which is highlighted on the PDF.

Thanks!

[JorjMcKie]

There is one thing you must keep in mind:
Annotations are not part of the page's contents. Imagine them like dust on a nice painting on the wall. The items shown in the painting are not aware of any dust that may cover them. And like dust, annotations can be wiped out without changing the page itself.
You get the idea.
Accordingly, an annotation may cover just anything: text, drawings, images ... or nothing.
There is a rectangle associated with an annotation, annot.rect, which can be used to find out what is underneath it. For example do this to find any covered text: text = page.get_text(clip=annot.rect).

But of course, highlight annotations (like their friends: underlines, strike-throughs, squiggles) are mostly used to mark text. So you might want to do this:

for annot in page.annots(types=(fitz.PDF_ANNOT_HIGHLIGHT, fitz.PDF_ANNOT_UNDERLINE)):
    print(page.get_text(clip=annot.rect))

The annotation method annot.get_text() only delivers the text stored as part of some specific annotation types: freetext and stamps. Like mentioned above, this text is not part of the page, but part of the annotation.