Remove Highlight from PDF Online

May 9, 2025 6 min read

PDFs, or Portable Document Format files, have become essential for sharing and preserving documents across various platforms. Highlighting text in PDFs is a common practice for review, collaboration, and emphasizing key information. However, there are situations where removing highlights becomes necessary to achieve a cleaner, more professional document. BreezePDF offers a straightforward solution to easily remove highlights from your PDFs directly in your browser.

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Why Remove Highlights from PDFs?

  • Cluttered Appearance: A document saturated with highlights can appear visually overwhelming and difficult to read. Removing unnecessary highlights can significantly improve readability and focus.
  • Sharing Clean Copies: Before sharing a PDF with colleagues or clients, removing highlights can present a cleaner, more professional image. This ensures that the recipients focus on the core content rather than your annotations. Sharing a clean copy enhances the overall professionalism and clarity of the document.
  • Changed Priorities: Information that was once deemed important enough to highlight may lose its significance over time. Removing outdated highlights ensures that the document reflects current priorities and insights. This helps keep the document relevant and focused.
  • Printing Issues: Highlights can sometimes translate poorly to printed documents, making the text harder to read or consuming excessive ink. Removing highlights before printing can improve readability and reduce ink usage. This ensures a better print quality and cost-effectiveness.

Methods for Removing Highlights from PDFs Online

Using BreezePDF (Our Solution)

BreezePDF simplifies the process of removing highlights with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. There's no need to download any software or create an account. BreezePDF operates entirely within your web browser, ensuring your documents remain private and secure. Learn how to create fillable pdf in indesign

  1. Upload your PDF to BreezePDF: Simply drag and drop your PDF file into the designated area on the BreezePDF website. The document will be instantly accessible for editing.
  2. Select the highlight you wish to remove: Once the PDF is uploaded, navigate through the document and locate the highlight you want to eliminate. Click directly on the highlighted area to select it.
  3. Click the delete/remove icon: With the highlight selected, a small toolbar will appear. Look for a delete or remove icon (usually a trash can symbol) and click it. The selected highlight will disappear immediately.
  4. Repeat for all highlights: Continue this process for each highlight you want to remove from the PDF. Ensure you remove all unnecessary highlights for a cleaner final document.
  5. Download the cleaned PDF: Once you've removed all desired highlights, click the download button to save the cleaned PDF to your computer. The file will be ready for sharing or printing. You can then add fillable boxes to pdf if you wish.

BreezePDF is designed for ease of use, allowing you to efficiently remove highlights without any technical expertise. BreezePDF prioritizes user privacy and eliminates the hassle of registration and fees. This makes BreezePDF the perfect solution for quick and secure PDF highlight removal.

Alternative Online PDF Editors

Several other online PDF editors provide tools for removing highlights. Platforms like Adobe Acrobat Online and Smallpdf offer highlight removal functions as part of their broader PDF editing suites. These tools typically involve selecting the highlight and then choosing a delete option from a menu or toolbar.

Other platforms may provide features such as the ability to search and remove all highlights in one batch. Different interfaces exist across different platforms, but the fundamental steps for removing highlights remain similar. This allows users to choose the platform that best suits their specific needs and preferences. However, consider your privacy needs, since most of these will send the PDF to a server. Consider learning acrobat add fillable form fields.

Step-by-Step Guides Using Other Platforms

Adobe Acrobat Online

  1. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat online.
  2. Single-click on the area of highlighted text you wish to remove.
  3. A small toolbox will appear with two options, allowing you to change the color of your highlight or delete the highlight altogether.
  4. To remove your highlight, click the trash can icon.

Smallpdf

  1. Open your PDF file with highlighted content in PDF Annotator.
  2. Using the Select tool, click on the highlighted area of text and delete.
  3. Repeat for any other highlights you want to remove.
  4. Download or export your PDF once you are done.

Removing Highlights from Scanned PDFs

Scanned PDFs are essentially images of documents, meaning the text isn't directly editable. To remove highlights from these documents, you'll first need to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR converts the image-based text into a selectable and editable text layer.

Once OCR is applied, you can use a PDF editor like BreezePDF to select and remove the highlights as you would with a standard PDF. This conversion step is crucial to enable highlight removal on scanned documents. You should also learn acrobat make pdf editable.

Can't Remove Highlights? Troubleshooting

  • Document is Scanned: If you can't select the highlight, the document may be a scanned image. Use OCR to convert the image to editable text.
  • Password Protection: Password-protected PDFs restrict editing. You will need to enter the password to unlock the PDF and remove highlights.
  • Limited Permissions: Some PDFs have restricted editing permissions. If you encounter this, you may need to contact the document owner for full editing access. Passwords can be classified as Owner Passwords, which are necessary in such cases.
  • Corrupted File: In rare cases, a corrupted PDF file might prevent highlight removal. Try opening the file with a different PDF editor or attempting to repair the PDF. If problems persist, the file may need to be reconstructed.

Beyond Highlight Removal: Other PDF Editing Tasks

BreezePDF offers a suite of tools beyond highlight removal to enhance your PDF editing capabilities. With BreezePDF, you can easily add text and images to your PDFs, tailoring the content to your specific needs. Additionally, you can merge and split PDFs, efficiently organizing your documents.

BreezePDF enables you to convert PDFs to various formats, ensuring compatibility across different platforms. You can also compress PDFs to reduce file size without sacrificing quality, facilitating easier sharing and storage. Moreover, BreezePDF allows you to digitally sign PDFs, streamlining your document approval processes. Plus, it is all add fields to pdf free.

Conclusion

Removing highlights from PDFs is often necessary for clarity, professionalism, and relevance. BreezePDF provides a simple, secure, and free solution to effortlessly remove highlights directly within your browser. With its ease of use and commitment to privacy, BreezePDF is the perfect tool for managing and editing your PDF documents.

Whether you need to clean up a cluttered document, prepare a professional copy for sharing, or simply update outdated annotations, BreezePDF has you covered. Give BreezePDF a try today and experience the convenience of seamless PDF editing.