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How to Remove Highlight in PDF

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2024-03-04 16:28:54 • Filed to: Highlight PDF • Proven solutions

This can happen to any of us, you highlight text in PDF accidentally, and you want to remove it. Highlights and other annotation tools allow us to add emphasis to certain sections. But when you put your mind on autopilot, you might highlight something by mistake. Can you remove highlight from PDF? Of course, you can. Whether you highlight a single word, a line, or the whole paragraph, we will show you how to delete highlight in PDF with Wondershare PDFelement - PDF Editor and Wondershare PDF Reader.

Part 1: How to Remove All Highlights in PDF with PDFelement

Imagine receiving a document with 300 pages, and there are highlights in yellow, green, and blue. You want to remove all highlights from the PDF. Imagine going through the PDF, and removing the highlights one by one. That can be time-consuming. Well, luckily, Wondershare PDFelement - PDF Editor, an powerful yet easy-to-use PDF editor, gives you an option for how to delete all highlights in PDF. And you can do it in a matter of minutes.

Step 1. Open PDF in the PDF Highlight Remover

Launch PDFelement, and then locate the file you want to remove the highlight. You can either click the add button, or drag and drop the PDF file into the program.

remove all highlights from pdf

Step 2. Remove Highlights from PDF

After opening the PDF file in PDFelement, in the left panel of the document, you will notice the Comment tab.

Remove all highlights from PDF. Click on the "Comment" left sidebar. Now, a window will open and list all the comments. Select the highlights you want to delete by holding the "Ctrl" key and clicking the highlights. Simply press the "Delete" key on your keyboard to remove all highlights from PDF.

delete all highlights in pdf

Remove a single highlight from PDF. Go to the Comment tab and find the highlighting on your PDF. Hover the cursor over the highlighted text. Right-click to open the menu. Click Delete to remove the highlighting.

delete single highlights in pdf

Step 3. Save PDF

Click the "File">"Save as" button to save the PDF file after deleting the highlight in PDF. If you need to edit the PDF, you can also do so before saving the PDF.

remove all highlight in pdf


Part 2: How to Remove Highlight from PDF for Free

Wondershare has featured some of the best tools in the market. While providing fully-packed tools, it has also focused on delivering simple, accessible, and convenient tools. Wondershare PDF Reader is a prominent example that helps users perform many simple annotating functions across their PDF documents. It's completely free for Windows to use. If you want to perform a simple task to remove highlights from PDF, you can consider using a PDF reader by following the steps below.

Step 1. Open the Highlighted PDF in PDF Reader

Download and install PDF Reader across your desktop. On launching it, tap on "Open files" to import the document from which you wish to remove highlights.

remove highlight from pdf

Step 2. Remove Highlight from PDF

On importing the file, you need to tap on the "Comment" section present on the left-side panel of the screen. This opens up the comments and highlights done across the menu.

Locate the appropriate highlight that you wish to remove from the PDF. Once located, right-click and select “Delete” from the drop-down menu.  Or you can single-click the highlighted text and then press the "Delete" key on your keyboard to remove the Highlights. This will remove highlights from PDF successfully. On completion, save the document.

how to remove highlight in pdf


Part 3: How to Remove Highlight from PDF Online

If you are into online platforms, Wondershare Document Cloud is a very effective option that can be considered to remove all highlights from PDF. To effectively cover this process, you need to look into the steps below.

Step 1. Access the Online Tool to Delete Highlight in PDF

You need to open the official website for Wondershare Document Cloud and tap on "Access Cloud" to open the interface for Document Cloud. Log in to the platform if required.

how to erase highlight in pdf

Step 2. Upload PDF File to Remove Highlight

On the next screen, you need to tap on “Upload Files” to import the file that needs to be edited. On a successful open, you would be redirected to a new screen.

how to delete highlight in pdf online

Step 3. Remove Highlights in PDF

Once the file opens on a new screen, you need to tap on "Add Comment" to lead to the required tools for removing the highlights. Across the "Comments" column, you will observe the highlight performed across the document. You can perform either of the functions to remove the highlight from the PDF.

  • On tapping across the highlight within the document, you will observe a “Delete” icon alongside the highlight. Click to remove the highlight.
  • You can also see details of the highlighted content across the “Comment” column. Tap on the three-dotted icon and tap “Delete” to remove highlight from PDF.
remove highlight from pdf online


Part 4: The Best Tool to Remove Highlight from PDF

This article has featured a distinctive introduction to three different tools for removing highlights from a PDF document. If you are looking for a quick solution without any downloads, Wondershare Document Cloud is a good option to go for. Regardless of its easy-to-use interface, this platform requires a sustained internet connection to work on. For this, you can go for offline remedies.

While looking into the offline remedies, Wondershare PDF Reader is an option that offers simple editing functions across a free system. PDF Reader can be an excellent option with no subscriptions if your task requires simple edits. In contrast, Wondershare PDFelement is a feature-rich PDF tool that works on many functions, making itself a perfect PDF manager. 
Designed with usability and simplicity, the software gives you full control over PDF. You can do almost everything with a single click.

So, let's go through all the features and analyze what makes PDFelement one of the best professional PDF software on the market.

  • Create and manage digital signatures
  • Insert text, image, or link within the document
  • Add watermark to the PDF document
  • Edit the background or adjust the visible page of the PDF document
  • Optimize PDF to reduce the file size
  • Perform OCR to turn scanned documents and images into searchable and editable text
  • Convert to Office formats, rich text format, Epub, HTML, image, or text format
  • Insert pages, split pages, or extract pages from the document


Part 5: Remove Highlight from PDF - FAQs

1. How to remove highlighted text in PDF?

If you need to remove not only the yellow highlights, but also the highlighted text in a PDF, you can use Wondershare PDFelement - PDF Editor. Just open a PDF file in the program, click Edit and select the yellow highlighted text and right click Delete to remove it.

remove highlight from pdf online

2. Why can't I remove highlight in PDF?

If you can't remove highlights in a PDF, that's probably because the PDF is a scanned or flatten PDF image so that it's uneditable. To make the text editable again, you can use OCR feature in a PDF editor to convert the scanned PDF to editable PDF.

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Free Download or Buy PDFelement right now!

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Elise Williams

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