Delete highlights in a previously created pdf document, highlights appear only as paths.

[VineethJose]

I have few pdf documents which were created by someone else previously. Couple of documents, hundreds of pages, thousands of highlights.

I tried to remove the highligts from the 'comment' section, but it wont appear there.

They appear has 'paths' in the 'content' section. I can delete them individually there, but deleting thousands of them is mentally exhausting.

Is there someway to remove them in bulk ? Convert the yellow colour to white ? save as or print to a pdf file without those paths/shapes ? any idea to remove them?

I have attached a sample page here. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hWqVnlEJS73msbwzrmtAGysB-qqSj9vu/view?usp=sharing

Thanks in advance.

[MeenakshiNegi]

Hi VineethJose,

Thank you for reaching out.

We have checked the document pages that you have shared here. It seems that the PDF was flattened before sharing.

There is no default option to remove the highlight marks at once. However, you may check if any script may help in that.

Let us know if we can be of any help.

Thanks,

Meenakshi

[try67]

It's not possible with a script.

[try67]

I would try to do it using Photoshop (or some other image processing application). Export all the pages to images (use the highest possible quality, and the PNG or TIFF formats for best results), run a batch command in PS to replace all the yellow color with white (ask in the PS forums how to do that), then create a new PDF file from those edited images, and run Text Recognition on it.