Remove PDF Annotations

After a document has been reviewed, it carries everyone’s traces: sticky notes, highlights, strike-outs, freehand circles, “Approved” stamps. Before it goes to a client, a printer or the public, you want the clean version. Removing annotations one by one in a reader is tedious and easy to get wrong on page 47. Here you see every kind of annotation in the file at once and remove them by type.

What counts as an annotation

Annotations are objects placed on top of a page, separate from its content:

• Comments and sticky notes, including typed text boxes and their pop-up windows.
• Highlights, underlines, strike-outs and squiggly lines over text.
• Drawings and shapes: freehand ink, boxes, circles, lines and polygons.
• Stamps such as “Draft” or “Approved”, and watermark annotations.
• Attached files pinned to a page.
• Links, both to web pages and inside the document.
• Form fields, which are technically annotations too.

When you open a file, each group appears with its count.

Choosing what to remove

Markup from reviewers is selected by default. Links and form fields are kept by default, because they’re usually part of the finished document. Select them only when you have a reason:

• remove links for a print-ready file or when they point to internal systems,
• remove form fields only if the form should disappear entirely. To keep the answers but lock them, use Fill & Flatten PDF Forms instead.

Save the comments first

Reviewer comments can be worth keeping: decisions, questions, change requests. Open comments with text to read them with their page numbers and authors, and click Save comments as .txt. You get a plain list you can paste into an email, a ticket or a change log, and then remove the comments from the PDF with a clear conscience.

What stays untouched

Only the annotations are removed. The page text, images and layout are exactly as before, nothing is re-compressed and the file usually gets slightly smaller.

Comments that were flattened, for example by printing the reviewed PDF to a new PDF or by scanning a marked-up printout, are no longer annotations; they’re part of the page. They can’t be removed here. To hide them, use Redact PDF or cover them with Edit PDF.

Before publishing

Annotations often carry reviewer names in their author field. Removing them takes those names out too. For a thorough clean-up, also clear the document properties with the PDF Metadata Editor, and compare the clean copy against the reviewed version with Compare PDF to confirm only markup was removed.

Reviews stay private

Review comments are often candid. The file is read and cleaned in your browser, and neither the comments nor the document are uploaded.

A worked example: a contract after negotiation

A freelancer and a client have marked up a contract with comments, highlights and a stamp.

1. Open the final PDF: 31 comments, 5 highlights and 1 stamp are listed, plus 2 links.
2. Save the comments as a text file for the project records.
3. Keep links unselected and remove the other 37 annotations.
4. Send the clean contract for signature with Sign PDF.

Comments from other programs

Word’s tracked changes and comments are not PDF annotations; remove them in Word before exporting. Comments added in PDF readers such as Acrobat, Preview or browser viewers that save them into the file are ordinary PDF annotations and are removed here.