How do I hide or delete all the highlights on a PDF?

April 5, 2023 12:53 PM

Is there a way to hide or delete all of the highlighting on a PDFat once? I have access to Windows and Mac. My PDF has a lot of highlights (e.g.), but I only seem to have the option to delete one at a time. How do I remove or hide all of them?
posted by andoatnp to Technology (5 answers total)

These are potentially the nuclear options if your PDF has other metadata/comments you want to keep, but Adobe Acrobat Pro has two options for you: Remove Hidden Information, under the Redact menu, where you can choose to remove all comments and markup, and Sanitize Document, also under the Redact menu, which will indiscriminately get rid of all metadata, scripts, comments, etc.
posted by yasaman at 1:39 PM on April 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you don't have Acrobat Pro, I just tested out this option for you in regular old free Acrobat for Windows: Print your file to PDF, and in the print dialogue window, under Comments & Forms, choose Document rather than Document and Markups. That will output a clean PDF with no highlights or other comments.
posted by yasaman at 1:46 PM on April 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

If you don’t have access to Acrobat, it is sometimes possible to open a PDF in a text editor and change or delete some of the contents or formatting commands. You’d need to comfortable mucking around in code you don’t fully understand, but doing so can be a real time saver in some situations.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 2:02 PM on April 5, 2023

Best answer: In Preview on Mac, click Tools>Show inspector, choose the Annotations inspector (the pencil), click one of your highlights in the list and then click Command-A to select all, and then delete. Sometimes it mysteriously misses one or two, which I normally then just delete those by hand.
posted by neatsocks at 2:14 PM on April 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: In Preview on Mac, click Tools>Show inspector, choose the Annotations inspector (the pencil), click one of your highlights in the list and then click Command-A to select all, and then delete. Sometimes it mysteriously misses one or two, which I normally then just delete those by hand.

I used this solution.
posted by andoatnp at 1:07 AM on April 8, 2023 [1 favorite]