discreetpdf.com

Remove annotations from a PDF

Drop a PDF and every comment, highlight, and markup is stripped out. Links and form fields stay. The file never leaves your device.

Files are processed entirely in your browser. Your file's contents never leave your device.

Your PDF never touches a server. There's nothing here to ration.

No daily caps. No spinner that turns into a paywall after the third file.

Private by architecture

Your PDF never leaves your device.

Unlimited use

No daily caps or hourly throttling. The heavier tools cap files at 100 MB.

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Works offline

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About this tool

A PDF that has been round a review picks up a layer of other people's marks: yellow highlights, sticky notes with names and timestamps attached, strikeouts, freehand scribbles, arrows, boxes, and comment threads replying to each other. That layer is useful right up until the moment you forward the document to a client, a candidate, or the other side of a deal, at which point it is somewhere between untidy and awkward. Removing annotations deletes that whole layer in one pass and leaves the document itself exactly as it was.

Drop a PDF and it runs immediately, with nothing to configure. Comments, notes, highlights, drawings, shapes, stamps and paperclip file attachments are taken out; clickable links and interactive form fields (including signature fields) are deliberately kept, because forwarding a clean copy should not mean handing someone a broken form. The result says how many annotations came out, which matters for a tool whose output otherwise looks identical to its input. Drop several PDFs and each is cleaned separately, with the option to take them back as one merged PDF instead of a zip.

The marks are deleted outright. Each annotation's own object is removed from the file along with the pieces it owns (the appearance stream that draws it, its rich-text body, its popup window, and any attached file), so the reviewer's words are not left sitting in the bytes for anyone who opens the PDF in a text editor. All of it happens in your browser with pdf-lib: nothing is uploaded, and a document full of frank internal comments never leaves your device. If a file turns out to have no annotations at all, you get it back untouched rather than a silently re-saved copy.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly gets removed?
Every annotation on every page: sticky notes and comment threads, highlights, underlines, strikeouts, freehand ink, lines, arrows, rectangles, ovals, callouts and text boxes, stamps, and files attached to a page as a paperclip. Links and form fields are the two deliberate exceptions: they stay.
Will my links and form fields survive?
Yes. Clickable links keep working and interactive fields stay fillable, signature fields included. They are page functionality rather than review markup, so removing them silently would break the document you are trying to tidy.
How is this different from flattening?
Flattening makes interactive form fields permanent: the answers stay visible, they just stop being editable. This does the opposite for the review layer: the marks are deleted outright, so nothing about them remains visible. Use flatten to lock a filled form, use this to hand over a clean copy.
Does removing a highlight remove the text under it?
No, and this is worth being clear about: the page content is untouched. A highlight is a colored mark drawn over the text, so taking it away leaves the sentence perfectly readable. If you need words gone from the file, that is redaction, not annotation removal.
Is the comment text really gone from the file?
Yes. The annotation objects are deleted from the document rather than just unlinked from the page, and their appearance streams and rich-text bodies go with them, so the comments are not recoverable from the file's raw bytes. Nothing is uploaded to do it; the work happens in your browser.
Does it remove files attached to the PDF?
It removes a file attached as a paperclip annotation on a page, because that is an annotation. Attachments embedded at the document level are a different thing: they never appear on a page, so removing them silently under a heading about comments would be the wrong promise, and this tool leaves them alone. If those are what you are after, Sanitize PDF removes them, along with any embedded scripts. Nothing here reads or uploads an attachment either way.
I drew on my PDF in your editor and this says there is nothing to remove. Why?
Because those marks are no longer annotations. Anything you draw in the editor (pencil, highlighter, shapes, text you type in) is written into the page itself when you save, which is what makes it look identical in every reader. Once that has happened there is no annotation layer left to strip, and this tool tells you so rather than handing back a re-saved copy of the same file. It removes the comments and markup that came inside the file from Acrobat, Preview, and other PDF apps. To take your own drawings back off, undo them in the editor before saving, or keep the original file.

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