How to get PDF annotations including comments in Node.JS

In this post I am going to show you how to use Node.JS to get all of the annotations from a given PDF document, and it’s only going to require a couple minutes of your time.

Let’s setup our client first:

npm install cloudmersive-convert-api-client --save

Moving on, create a new instance of the edit PDF API, which contains editPdfGetAnnotations.

var CloudmersiveConvertApiClient = require('cloudmersive-convert-api-client');
var defaultClient = CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.ApiClient.instance;
// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
var Apikey = defaultClient.authentications['Apikey'];
Apikey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';
// Uncomment the following line to set a prefix for the API key, e.g. "Token" (defaults to null)
//Apikey.apiKeyPrefix = 'Token';
var apiInstance = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.EditPdfApi();
var inputFile = "/path/to/file"; // File | Input file to perform the operation on.
var callback = function(error, data, response) {
if (error) {
console.error(error);
} else {
console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + data);
}
};
apiInstance.editPdfGetAnnotations(inputFile, callback);

Your annotations will then be returned to you in this format:

{
  "Successful": true,
  "Annotations": [
    {
      "Title": "string",
      "AnnotationType": "string",
      "PageNumber": 0,
      "AnnotationIndex": 0,
      "Subject": "string",
      "TextContents": "string",
      "CreationDate": "2020-05-07T02:43:34.747Z",
      "ModifiedDate": "2020-05-07T02:43:34.747Z",
      "LeftX": 0,
      "TopY": 0,
      "Width": 0,
      "Height": 0
    }
  ]
}

And it’s as easy as that!