How to Remove Annotations, Comments and Form Fields from a PDF
Strip the markup layer off a PDF in your browser — comments, highlights, stamps, links and form fields — with the honest catch about filled form values.
What counts as an annotation
In a PDF, review markup is not part of the page. Comments, highlights, underlines, strikeouts, sticky notes, stamps, popups and hyperlinks all live in a separate annotation layer, and interactive form fields sit in that same layer as widget annotations. Removing annotations therefore means emptying that layer, which is why one button can clear all of those things at once — and why form fields are affected unless you ask for them to be kept.
The page itself is a separate content stream. This tool does not touch it, so the text, images, layout, fonts, bookmarks, file attachments and document metadata all survive unchanged. It is not a re-render and not a rasterization: the output is the same PDF with a cleaner structure.
Check what is in the file first
Open the PDF and read the report before you remove anything. You get the total annotation count, a per-page breakdown showing which pages are marked up, and a split by kind — markup, links, stamps and form fields. That split is the part worth pausing on, because it is where surprises show up.
If the tool reports 40 annotations and 3 of them are form fields, the default run removes all 40 of them, not just the 37 comments and links, because the fields are annotations too. If the file is filled in and you need those fields to stay usable, tick the keep-form-fields box first; only the review markup goes, and the fields remain fillable. If every annotation in the file is a form field, keeping them means there is nothing left to remove, and the tool says so instead of handing you an unchanged copy.
The filled-in value catch
This is the one behaviour that surprises people, so it is worth being precise about. When someone types a value into a form field, the value is usually stored inside the field, and the visible text you see on the page is generated from it as an appearance stream that belongs to the field. Remove the field and both go: the stored value and the drawn text.
If the form was flattened before you got the file — the value had already been painted into the page content — then the value is ordinary page text and it stays put, because the page was never modified. So a filled field keeps its value only when that value was already drawn onto the page. If you need the values preserved, either keep the form fields, flatten the form first with PDF Flatten, or read the values out with a form-field tool before removing anything.
Run it and download the clean copy
Press the remove button. It states the exact number of annotations it is about to strip, and the download happens only after you confirm, so nothing is removed by surprise. The output is named after your source file with -no-annotations.pdf appended, and the result panel reports how many objects were found, how many were removed, how many form fields stayed, the output size and how that compares with the original. If the download is lost, the same file can be fetched again from that panel without re-running the tool.
The annotation objects are dropped from the document structure rather than merely hidden, so no reader will display them again, and the objects those annotations owned — popups, reply threads, appearance streams — are pruned from the file as well. A small amount of unreferenced data can still survive in the raw bytes of any rewrite; no conforming reader shows it, but it is the reason this tool does not promise a forensic scrub. There is no undo after the download, so keep the original if the comments may matter later.
What this tool does not do
It is not a redaction tool. It empties the annotation layer and leaves the page content alone, which is the right job for cleaning up a review copy and the wrong job for removing sensitive information: text that was already drawn on the page, or hidden inside a page, is not touched at all. Use PDF Redact for that, and re-check the result in a reader before you share it.
It cannot be undone, and it is not signature-preserving. Deleting a single comment changes the file, so a digitally signed PDF comes out of this tool no longer signed — the signature covered the bytes that were there before, and those bytes are gone. A dynamic (XFA or JavaScript) form is the other special case: its field data and its fill-in behaviour live in the same AcroForm entry the fields live in, so removing the fields removes that entry and the form stops behaving like a form. Flatten such a document first, or read the values out before stripping it.
Limits, and what to do about them
The tool accepts files up to 100 MB and 200 pages, and it says so before it starts rather than failing halfway through. Password-protected PDFs are outside its scope: remove the password with PDF Unlock, then strip the annotations. Documents that are scanned images carry no annotations to remove, and nothing is added to them — if you are looking for text in a scan, that is PDF OCR's job.
All of the work happens in your browser. The PDF, including every comment inside it, stays on your machine and nothing is uploaded, which matters most for exactly the documents people most want cleaned up: contracts under review, internal drafts and anything with a comment thread you would rather not send to a third-party server.
Try it free — Remove Annotations
Removes every annotation from a PDF — comments, highlights, stamps, links and form fields — while leaving the page content, text, images and layout untouched.
Open Remove Annotations