PDF Comment Generator (PDF-comment-gen)

PDF-comment-gen is a Node.js utility designed to extract annotations from PDF files and provide the user with two output options:

1. Generate a text file with the extracted annotations.
2. Append the annotations to the end of the original PDF on a new page.

Requirements

• Node.js (tested on v14 and v16; compatibility with newer versions may vary)
• npm

Dependencies

• pdfjs-dist: For reading and extracting annotations from PDFs.
• pdf-lib: For appending annotations to a PDF.

To install all the required dependencies, run the following:

npm install

Usage

node PDF-comment-gen.js <input_pdf_path> <output_path> <action>

Arguments:

• <input_pdf_path>: The path to the input PDF file from which annotations will be extracted.
• <output_path>: The path where the output (text or modified PDF) will be saved.
• <action>: The desired action. It can be:
  • text: To save the extracted annotations to a text file.
  • pdf: To append the annotations to the original PDF.

For example, to extract annotations from file.pdf and save them to annotations.txt, use:

node PDF-comment-gen.js file.pdf annotations.txt text

To append the annotations to file.pdf and save the result as file_with_annotations.pdf, use:

node PDF-comment-gen.js file.pdf file_with_annotations.pdf pdf