A document that’s been through a few rounds of internal review often ends up covered in sticky notes, highlights, and comments from different reviewers — useful during the review, but not something you want visible when the final version goes out to a client, a regulator, or the public.
What counts as an annotation
Annotations are objects layered on top of a PDF’s page content: comments, sticky notes, highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, stamps, drawn shapes (arrows, boxes, circles someone sketched over the page), text-box callouts, file attachments, and links added by a reader or reviewer. They’re stored separately from the actual text and images on the page, which is exactly what makes it possible to strip them out cleanly.
That also covers annotations you can’t easily see — a comment popup someone collapsed, or a note marked non-printing. Clicking through a viewer and deleting each visible highlight one at a time can miss those. Removing the whole annotation layer at once doesn’t.
Removing them
Delete Annotations scans every page and removes every annotation object it finds:
- Upload the PDF.
- Download the result — comments, highlights, sticky notes, and similar markup are gone from every page.
The underlying text, images, and layout are completely untouched — only the review markup is removed.
One thing to watch for: real clickable links on the page — a table of contents entry, a “visit our site” link, a cross-reference — are technically annotations too, and they get removed along with everything else. The link text stays on the page; it just stops being clickable.
What this doesn’t remove — and what order to do things in
Annotations are a different thing from a filled-in form’s field values, and from a digital signature. But both interact with annotation removal in a way that’s worth knowing about before you run it.
A fillable form field’s on-page box is technically its own kind of annotation (a “widget”), which is what makes it interactive. If you run Delete Annotations on a PDF that still has an active, unflattened form, the field boxes — and the values typed into them — disappear from the page along with the review markup. The data isn’t necessarily gone from the underlying file, but it won’t be visible or usable in a normal PDF viewer anymore. If you need the filled-in answers to stay visible and locked in place, flatten the form first, then run Delete Annotations on the result — not the other way around.
A digital signature is affected too, for a different reason. Signing works by hashing the exact bytes of the file at the moment it’s signed, and every tool on this site — this one included — re-saves the whole file when it processes it. That re-save changes the underlying bytes, which breaks the signature’s byte-range hash. This isn’t specific to Delete Annotations; running any edit on a signed PDF has the same effect. If a document needs a real, verifiable digital signature, sign it last, after every other cleanup step — not before.
Before you send it out
A highlight is just a colored overlay — deleting it doesn’t touch or hide the text underneath. If a reviewer highlighted a passage because it contains something genuinely sensitive, that text is still sitting there in plain, selectable form once the highlight is gone. Annotation removal cleans up markup; it doesn’t redact content.
If the document also has a title or author field in its metadata pointing to an internal reviewer, that’s worth checking separately — annotation removal doesn’t touch metadata. Edit PDF Metadata lets you clean that up too before the file goes anywhere external.