The reviewed contract still had the internal comments inside it

A document passes through three or four hands before it goes out. Someone highlights a clause in yellow. Someone else leaves a sticky note in the margin: “don’t send this number yet, check with finance.” A third person strikes through a paragraph and writes what they really think of the other party. Then the reviewed file gets attached to an email and sent, and every one of those notes travels inside it.

reader.me now has a tool for the last step of that process: Remove annotations. It takes the comments, the highlights and the drawn marks out of a copy of the file, and leaves the document reading clean.

The notes are not part of the page

This is the part that catches people out. In a PDF, the text and images of a page are one thing, and the annotations are another — a separate list attached to each page. That separation is why a comment can be invisible to you and perfectly visible to whoever opens the file next.

Some viewers collapse a sticky note down to a small icon you stop noticing after five minutes. Some don’t render comments at all unless you open a sidebar. Others open the document with every note expanded on top of the text. You reviewed the file in one of the first kind; your client may well open it in the third. Nothing changed in the file between the two — only the software looking at it.

Three groups, and you mark them separately

The tool doesn’t have a “remove everything” button, and that’s deliberate. It works with three groups:

• Comments and sticky notes — the ones with text in them, including free text boxes dropped onto the page.
• Highlights and drawn marks — yellow highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, freehand ink, arrows, boxes and circles, stamps.
• Links — off by default. More on that below.

You can run it with just comments checked and keep the highlights, or the other way round. Before it does anything it tells you how many of each it found, so you know what you’re about to lose.

Why links are kept unless you ask

Links are annotations too, technically. They’re also the thing holding a document together: the table of contents, the cross-references, the “see clause 12” that jumps to clause 12. Removing them doesn’t visibly change a single pixel — the blue underlined text stays exactly where it was — it just stops working. Nobody notices until a reader clicks and nothing happens.

So the links checkbox starts unticked. If you want them gone, you have to say so.

Form fields are annotations, and the tool never touches them

Here’s the fact that decides the whole design. The fillable fields of a form — the boxes, the checkboxes, the dropdowns — are stored in exactly the same list as the sticky notes. Under the hood they’re annotations of a particular subtype.

Which means a naive “delete every annotation” would gut a form. The fields would vanish, the form definition would keep pointing at objects that no longer exist, and you’d be left with a document that looks like a form and can’t be filled in. The tool never removes them, no matter which boxes you tick, and there are tests in the codebase whose only job is to prove that a filled form still works after a cleanup pass.

If what you actually want is for the answers to stop being editable, that’s a different operation — flattening presses them into the page instead of deleting them.

The sticky note and its pop-up window

A comment usually isn’t one object but two: the icon on the page, and the pop-up window that shows its text when you click it. They reference each other inside the file.

Delete the note and forget the window and you get a mess — a pop-up with no parent, and references pointing at an object that isn’t there any more. Some viewers shrug it off, some show a ghost. The tool resolves the pair in both directions: a deleted note takes its window with it, and a window whose note is gone goes too.

What you lose, plainly

The text of a comment is gone for good in the copy you download. There’s no undo and no recovery. Your original file isn’t touched — the tool builds a new one — so keep the annotated version somewhere if the review history matters to you. In a lot of firms it does: the marked-up copy is the record of what was discussed.

One more thing, for completeness. If the PDF carries an accessibility structure tree that references the annotations being removed, a strict PDF/UA validator may complain about the result. Viewers and screen readers handle it fine in practice, but if you publish documents that have to pass formal accessibility validation, check the output before it goes into the pipeline.

While you’re at it, check the rest

Comments are the visible half of what a reviewed document carries. The other half is in the metadata — author names, the software that produced it, the internal file path it was saved from. That one is worth two minutes as well, and for the same reason: neither of them is something you’d have written into the document on purpose.

Everything happens in your browser. The file you’re cleaning is, almost by definition, one you don’t want to upload anywhere.

Remove annotations