How to Remove Highlights From a PDF (Even Someone Else's)

A highlight in a PDF is usually easy to remove — if it's a real highlight. The catch is that yellow marks in PDFs come in two kinds: annotations sitting on top of the page (removable in seconds) and color that's been baked into the page itself (a different job entirely). Here's how to tell which you've got and how to clear each one, whether the highlights are yours or came with a document someone sent you.

First, a two-second diagnosis

Open the PDF and click directly on the highlight. If it selects — an outline appears, or a comment pops up — it's an annotation, and the easy methods below will work. If clicking does nothing and the highlight behaves like part of the page, it's been flattened into the content; skip to the last section.

Remove every highlight at once (browser, free)

If the goal is a clean copy — a marked-up study PDF back to pristine, a reviewed draft ready to send onward — the fastest route is our annotation remover: drop the PDF in, and it strips highlights, comments, underlines, and sticky notes in one pass. You choose whether to remove everything or just certain types. Like all our tools it runs in your browser, so the document never leaves your computer.

Remove highlights one at a time

Adobe Acrobat Reader (free version): click the highlight, press Delete. If clicking selects text instead, right-click the highlight and choose Delete. The Comments panel (View > Comments) lists every annotation in the file — handy for picking through them.
Mac Preview: click the highlight to select it, press Delete. If it won't select, open Tools > Show Inspector > the annotations tab to find it.
Browsers: Edge can remove highlights it created (click > Delete). Chrome's built-in viewer displays highlights but won't delete them — use one of the options above.

Why some highlights won't delete

Three usual suspects:

The PDF was flattened. Whoever sent it merged all annotations into the page — common when exporting from note-taking apps. The highlight is now just yellow pixels. (Our flattening guide explains why people do this on purpose.)
The document is restricted. Some PDFs have permissions that block editing annotations. Our unlock tool removes those restrictions if you have the right to edit the file.
It was highlighted before scanning. Physical marker on paper, then scanned — that's part of the image, not an annotation at all.

For flattened or scanned highlights over white backgrounds, there's still a decent fix: open the file in our editor and whiteout the mark, or retype the affected text over a clean background. For highlights over images or complex layouts, honestly, there's no clean automated fix — the highlight and the content are the same pixels.

Highlighting better next time

If you're marking up your own documents, keep highlights as annotations (any proper PDF tool does this by default — including our annotator) and only flatten when you deliberately want the marks to become permanent. Removable by default is the state you want.