How to remove comments, highlights and markup from a PDF

Comments, highlights and sticky notes in a PDF are stored separately from the page itself, so they can be removed without touching the text and images underneath. The remove annotations tool strips them from every page in one go. This guide explains why removal is clean, which markup qualifies, and the cases where it does not work the way people expect.

Comments are annotations

Every PDF page has a content stream, the fixed drawing of its text and graphics, and an optional list of annotations: separate objects positioned on the page, each with its own appearance and data. Review tools add comments as annotations rather than editing the page, which is why a reviewer can highlight a contract without being able to change its wording. Because annotations sit in their own list, removing them is a matter of deleting entries from that list. The page content underneath is never rewritten. How PDF files work: why some have text and some are pictures shows where these lists live in the file.

What counts as markup

The PDF standard defines many annotation types. The ones you meet in reviews, and the names the tool uses when it reports what it removed, are:

• Text — the sticky note icon, plus its Popup window and any replies;
• FreeText — text typed directly on the page;
• Highlight, Underline, StrikeOut, Squiggly — text markup;
• Ink — freehand pen drawing; Square, Circle, Line, Polygon — shapes;
• Stamp — APPROVED, DRAFT and similar stamps;
• Link and Widget — clickable links and form fields, which are technically annotations too.

Removing them

Drop in the PDF, decide whether to keep links and form fields (both are kept by default, because most people want a clean document that still works), and download the cleaned copy. The result lists what was removed by type, for example Highlight ×12, Text ×4, Popup ×4, so you can see the review was what you thought. Sticky notes appear as Text, because that is their name in the PDF standard. Before removing anything, keep the reviewed original alongside the clean copy, so the discussion is not lost. Untick keep form fields to remove the fields and the form itself. If the file has no annotations, you get a copy back and a message saying so. Everything runs on your device.

One subtlety: a strike-out or a caret comment is a suggestion, not an edit. Removing a strike-out annotation removes the red line, not the words it was striking through. If the review asked for text changes, those have to be made in the source document and exported again.

What cannot be removed this way

• Flattened markup. If comments were burned into the page, by printing to PDF or by an app that flattens on export, they are now page content and cannot be separated. What flattening a PDF does, and when you should do it explains the difference.
• Tracked changes exported from Word. A document saved to PDF with markup showing has the balloons drawn as ordinary text. Turn off markup in Word and export again.
• Hidden information. Removing annotations does not touch document properties or hidden text. Check the author and title fields with the metadata editor.
• Pending redactions. A redaction mark in some editors is an annotation that has not yet been applied; deleting it hides nothing. Real redaction needs the redaction tool.
• Encrypted files, which may not save until the password is removed.
• Leftover data. Simply unlinking an annotation leaves its object, and its text, inside the saved file as unused data. The remove annotations tool deletes the removed annotation objects, their pop-up notes and their appearance streams before saving, so the comment text is not written out; other editors may not, so if comment text is sensitive check the result, or export a fresh PDF from the source.

A clean copy checklist

Before sending a reviewed document outside your team, remove the annotations, check the metadata for names and old titles, confirm the links still go where they should with the link extractor, and open the result in a second viewer. If anything sensitive was ever typed on the page rather than in a comment, removing comments will not hide it; How to redact a PDF so the text is actually gone covers that case.