Remove PDF Annotations Online Free
Remove annotations from PDF pages — comments, highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, and drawing markup. Clean up reviewed documents before sharing.
Remove annotations from a PDF
Strip out comments, highlights, sticky notes, underlines, strikethrough, and freehand ink markup to get a clean copy of your PDF. After a document has been through review, it's often covered in other people's notes — this gives you a tidy version to share with a client, archive, or print without the markup clutter. The underlying text and pages are untouched; only the annotation layer is removed.
How to remove PDF annotations
- Upload the marked-up PDF. It's read on your device — nothing is uploaded.
- Click Remove Annotations. Comments, highlights, and drawings are stripped from every page.
- Download the clean PDF — ready to send or file.
When you'd use this
- Before sending to a client — remove internal review notes and highlights.
- Archiving a final version — keep a clean record without reviewer markup.
- Printing — avoid highlights and sticky notes showing up on paper.
What gets removed (and what stays)
This removes the annotation layer: comments and sticky notes, text highlights, underlines and strikethrough, ink/pen drawings, shapes, and stamps. It does not change the document's real content — the text, images, and page layout stay exactly as they were. Note that highlighter marks are annotations, so they're removed; text that was actually recoloured in the source document is part of the content and stays. If you need to remove sensitive text itself (not just notes), that's redaction — a different operation.
Privacy
Your PDF is processed locally in the browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored, which matters when the comments themselves are confidential.
Related tools
FAQ
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. Annotation removal happens entirely in your browser, so confidential review comments never leave your device.
What kinds of annotations are removed?
Comments and sticky notes, highlights, underlines, strikethrough, ink/freehand drawings, shapes, and stamps across all pages.
Does it change the document content?
No. Only the annotation layer is removed. The text, images, and page layout stay exactly the same.
Is this the same as redaction?
No. This removes notes and markup added on top of the page. Redaction permanently removes sensitive content from the page itself — use a redaction tool for that.
Will form fields be removed too?
Form fields are a separate layer. To make filled form values permanent and non-editable, use the Flatten PDF form tool instead.