What is the difference between this and flattening?
Flattening burns annotations into the page so they stay visible but stop being editable. This deletes them entirely so they are gone. Choose by whether you want the markup visible or absent.
Comments, highlights, sticky notes and stamps are stored as annotation objects sitting on top of a PDF page, and most viewers will happily show them to whoever opens the file. This tool deletes those objects and leaves the page content intact. It is free, needs no account, and adds no watermark to your result.
Each page is walked with PyMuPDF and every annotation object is deleted, then the document is saved with garbage collection so the removed objects are not recoverable from the previous revision. Page text and images are untouched.
Where it stops: If nothing is removable the tool reports that plainly rather than handing back an unchanged file that looks processed. Form fields are widget annotations and are better handled by flattening.
Flattening burns annotations into the page so they stay visible but stop being editable. This deletes them entirely so they are gone. Choose by whether you want the markup visible or absent.
The markup is probably drawn into the page content rather than stored as annotations, which happens when a document has already been flattened or exported from certain tools.
No. The file is saved with cleanup enabled, so the deleted objects are not left behind in an earlier revision of the document.
Flatten PDF annotations and form appearances into normal page content so the final document is easier to share and archive.
Remove common PDF document metadata fields and save a cleaned copy without changing visible page content.
Permanently redact selected text or rectangular regions from PDF pages and burn the redaction into the saved output.
Detect and remove supported watermark objects from PDFs you have permission to modify and preview the result.