Files never leave your device.How it works
How to remove annotations
- 1Drop your PDF above (or click to select).
- 2Click Remove annotations.
- 3Download the cleaned PDF.
Frequently asked questions
- What exactly gets removed?
- Review markup and navigation annotations — highlights, sticky notes, ink, text/stamp annotations, and link annotations. Interactive form-field widgets are kept so forms keep working.
- Does my file get uploaded?
- No. The PDF is cleaned entirely in your browser — nothing leaves your device.
- Why keep form fields?
- Form fields are technically annotations too; removing them would break the form. To make a filled form non-editable instead, use Flatten.
A clean copy, no markup
Shared PDFs pick up highlights, sticky notes, ink scribbles, and review stamps. When you need a clean copy to distribute or archive, Remove Annotations strips all of that from every page in one pass — right in your browser, with nothing uploaded.
Forms stay intact
Form fields are a special kind of annotation, so a blanket strip would break interactive forms. This tool keeps form-field widgets and removes only review markup and links, so a fillable form still works afterwards. If you want to lock a filled form so its values can't change, use Flatten.
Notes and limits
If the PDF has no removable annotations, the file is returned unchanged and you'll be told so. Everything runs locally, so even a confidential document stays on your device.
What an annotation actually is in a PDF
Highlights, sticky notes, and comments aren't part of a page's visual content stream — they're separate objects attached to the page, each with its own position, appearance, and author metadata. That's why they can be listed in a reader's comments sidebar, why removing them doesn't touch the underlying text or images, and why a PDF that looks clean when opened casually can still carry a full comment history if you check the annotations panel. Stripping them removes that hidden layer along with anything visible.
Where this matters in practice
A contract that's been through several rounds of review accumulates sticky notes, highlighted clauses, and reviewer stamps that were useful during drafting but shouldn't ship with the final version. The same applies to a marked-up thesis chapter, a redlined proposal, or any PDF passed between people using a reader's built-in comment tools. Running Remove Annotations before sending the document out gives you a copy that reads as finished rather than in-progress, without manually deleting dozens of individual comments one at a time.
What it won't do
Annotations are separate from page content, so this tool can't touch text typed directly onto the page, burned-in redaction boxes, or a visible stamp drawn into the content stream rather than added as an annotation object. It also leaves the underlying document text untouched — only the markup layer goes. For document properties like author and creation date, use Edit Metadata instead, and follow up with Compress PDF if the annotations had bloated the file with embedded comment history.