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Remove Annotations from PDF

Strip comments, highlights, links and stamps. Free, and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, stored or sent to a server.

About Remove Annotations

Annotations are the layer of things that sit *on* a page rather than in it: highlights, sticky notes, ink, shapes, stamps, links — and, awkwardly for anyone trying to delete them all, form fields. Every text box and checkbox in a fillable PDF is an annotation with the subtype Widget.

That is why this asks which kinds rather than offering a single "remove all" button. Clearing a page's annotation list is a one-line operation and it silently destroys every form in the document. Choosing by kind is what makes "strip the reviewers' comments and leave the form alone" possible, which is the request people actually have.

Run it with nothing chosen first: the result lists what is in the document, by kind and by count. Deleting is easier to judge once you know whether those 46 annotations are highlights or the fields of a form.

Where it helps

  • Counts what is there before anything is deleted.
  • Removes by kind, so form fields survive a comment cleanup.
  • Clears the form definition as well when fields are removed, so readers do not show an empty forms bar.
  • Nothing is rasterised — the pages themselves are untouched.
  • The document stays in your browser, which for a marked-up draft is the point.

Limits

  • Removing an annotation removes what it said: a highlight's note and a comment's text go with it, with no way back.
  • Content drawn into the page rather than added as an annotation — a redaction that was flattened, for instance — is page content and is not touched.
  • Removing form fields discards the answers with them; flattening keeps the answers and removes the fields.
  • Digital signatures are annotations too, and removing them invalidates the signature.
  • Password-protected files must be unlocked first.

Frequently asked questions

Will this remove my form?

Only if you choose "form fields". Every other kind leaves the form untouched. If you want the answers kept but the fields gone, flatten the document instead — that draws the values into the page.

Do the comments really disappear from the file?

Yes — the annotation objects are removed and the file is rewritten, so the text of a comment is not left behind in the saved document. What it cannot remove is anything that was drawn into the page itself.

What counts as markup?

Highlights, underlines, strikeouts, squiggly underlines, carets and freehand ink — the things a reviewer draws on a page. Sticky notes and pop-ups are listed separately as comments.

Why remove links?

They are invisible until clicked, they survive printing as live URLs in the file, and a document shared outside an organisation can carry links to internal addresses nobody meant to publish.

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