DollarWise

Free PDF Annotation Remover — Strip Comments & Highlights Online

October 25, 2026 · 3 min read · By the DollarWise team

Review copies come back covered in comments, highlights, and sticky notes. This tool strips those annotations out of your PDF and hands you a clean copy — without uploading your document to any server.

PDF Annotation Remover

Strip comments, highlights & sticky notes — get a clean PDF back.

100% Free Forever No Sign-up No Credit Card Private — files never leave your browser Unlimited Use

1 Upload your PDF

📄 Drop a PDF here or click to browse

One PDF at a time · max 50 MB · files never leave your browser

2 Removal settings

Also remove link annotations
Link annotations are clickable areas. Removing them keeps the visible text intact.
Keep form fields working
On = widget annotations for form fields are kept so fillable forms still work. Off = they are removed too.
The PDF is re-saved by pdf-lib; content is preserved, not re-rendered.
Honest limits: this removes page-level annotations (comments, highlights, sticky notes, links, stamps). Text that was "burned in" to the page content — e.g. flattened highlights or scanned-in handwriting — is part of the page itself and cannot be removed. Form-field definitions in the document catalog are kept, so a fillable form stays fillable.

3 Strip & download

🧹 Removal report

🎉 Free forever. No sign-up. No credit card. No limits.

Clean unlimited PDFs — your files never leave your browser.

How it works

Upload a PDF and pick a mode — all annotations, comments only, or highlights & markup only. The tool opens your file with pdf-lib, walks every page, reads each page’s annotation list, and deletes the matching entries (keeping form-field widgets and links when you ask it to). It then re-saves the document and gives you a per-page report of what was removed. The visible text, images, and layout are untouched — only the annotation layer is stripped.

Honest limits: annotations that were flattened into the page (for example, a highlight “printed” into the page content by another app, or handwriting in a scanned image) are no longer annotations — they are part of the page itself and cannot be removed by this tool. Encrypted PDFs that pdf-lib cannot open will fail with a clear error instead of a corrupt download.

Everyday uses

  • Students — hand in a clean copy of a paper after tutor feedback.
  • Professionals — send clients a final contract without internal review notes.
  • Teachers — strip answer-key comments before sharing a worksheet.
  • Researchers — remove peer-review markup before archiving a manuscript.
  • Anyone — clean up a PDF before posting it publicly.

Your files never leave your browser — the whole process runs locally with pdf-lib.