Remove Comments and Highlights From a PDF
Comments are useful during review and embarrassing afterwards. Removing them is the difference between a working copy and a published file.
What this tool does
Removes highlights, underlines, strike-outs, comments, stamps and other annotations in one pass — the clean-up step after a review round.
How it works
Name the annotation types to remove (comma separated) or leave the box blank to take them all, and limit the job to a page range if only part of the document was marked up. The page content itself is not touched, so text that was highlighted stays as text.
- Choose the PDF, or drag it onto the page.
- Run the tool and download the result.
Settings that decide the result
- Annotation types to remove (comma separated; blank = all)
The remaining 1 controls stay on the tool page, where each one sits next to the live preview.
When to reach for it
- A reviewed file must go out clean. Remove every annotation in one pass.
- Only the client's highlights should go. Name the annotation types to strip.
Questions we get
What counts as an annotation?
Highlights, strikeouts, notes, free text, shapes, stamps and links — everything readers overlaid on the page. Tick the types to strip and the pages to clean.
Why did the tool leave my drawn shapes alone?
Highlights and shapes drawn with this site's editor are saved as page content — real ink in the page — rather than as annotation objects. Annotation tools can only take back what was added as an annotation, so a drawing baked into the page needs the original file, not a cleanup pass.
Where it fits
The tools people usually open next to Remove Annotations:
- Watermark — Add an image or text watermark to PDF documents.
- Bates Numbering — Bates stamp multiple files at once.
- Edit Metadata — Change PDF Author, Title, Keywords, Subject and other metadata fields
Every tool works on a copy, so the original file is never modified. Uploads are stored under an unguessable id and deleted automatically two hours after you last open them; nothing is listed, shared or indexed. More on the security page.