Extract annotations from document Leave feedback

Documents often carry annotations: comments, sticky notes and other markup that reviewers add on top of the content. GroupDocs.Parser reads them with the get_annotations method and returns a list of AnnotationItem objects.

Both return None if the document format does not support annotations, and an empty list if the document has none. Annotations are read from PDF, Word processing (DOC, DOCX, RTF) and PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX) documents; check parser.features.annotations when the format is not known in advance.

• GroupDocs.Parser for Python via .NET 26.10 or later installed
• A document with comments or notes

Here are the steps to extract annotations from a document:

1. Instantiate the Parser object for the initial document;
2. Call the get_annotations method;
3. Iterate through the list and read each annotation’s value.

from groupdocs.parser import Parser

# Create an instance of Parser class
with Parser("./reviewed.pdf") as parser:
    # Extract annotations from the whole document
    annotations = parser.get_annotations()

    if annotations is None:
        print("Annotation extraction isn't supported for this format")
    else:
        # Print the text of each annotation
        for annotation in annotations:
            print(annotation.value)

Expected behavior: Prints the text of every annotation in the document, one per line: a reviewer’s note and the text of a link annotation for the sample.

Each AnnotationItem also tells you who left the annotation, when, and on which page:

from groupdocs.parser import Parser

with Parser("./reviewed.pdf") as parser:
    for annotation in parser.get_annotations() or []:
        print("Type:", annotation.annotation_type)
        print("Author:", annotation.author_name or "-")
        print("Initials:", annotation.author_initials or "-")
        print("Created/modified:", annotation.timestamp)
        print("Page:", annotation.page_index + 1)
        print("Content:", annotation.value)
        print()

Expected behavior: For the sample, prints:

Type: Text
Author: Tomas Reyes
Initials: -
Created/modified: 2026-03-02 11:00:00
Page: 1
Content: Approve the hero crop before the print run.

Type: Link
Author: -
Initials: -
Created/modified: 2026-03-02 11:00:00
Page: 1
Content: Aurora Visuals portfolio

Not every format can carry annotations. Check parser.features.annotations first, or test the result of get_annotations for None:

from groupdocs.parser import Parser

with Parser("./sample.xlsx") as parser:
    # Check if the format supports annotations before extracting them
    if not parser.features.annotations:
        print("Annotation extraction isn't supported for this format")
    else:
        annotations = parser.get_annotations()
        print("Found %d annotations" % len(annotations))

Expected behavior: Prints Annotation extraction isn't supported for this format for a spreadsheet.

A review queue, an index or an AI agent usually wants annotations as data. Convert each item to a dictionary:

import json

from groupdocs.parser import Parser

with Parser("./reviewed.pdf") as parser:
    records = [
        {
            "page": annotation.page_index + 1,
            "type": annotation.annotation_type,
            "author": annotation.author_name,
            "timestamp": annotation.timestamp.isoformat() if annotation.timestamp else None,
            "text": annotation.value,
        }
        for annotation in parser.get_annotations() or []
    ]

print(json.dumps(records, indent=2))

Expected behavior: Prints a JSON array with one object per annotation.

The command line gives the same data without code: groupdocs-parser annotations reviewed.pdf --json.

• Page indexes are zero-based; add 1 when you show a page number to a person.
• get_annotations() returns an empty list, not None, for a document without annotations.
• To get the annotations’ text inside the extracted text instead, see Extract text with annotations.

• Extract annotations from document page
• Extract text with annotations
• Get document info