Participating Frequently

Question

How to select all content from all pages when in edit mode - Acrobat pro DC

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 14, 2021
4 replies
9370 views

I have a PDF comprising of a few thousand pages. What I want to do is select all content on all pages and delete this content, leaving just blank pages. When in edit mode, I am only able to select one page at a time. This is obviously very time consuming. How do I select all pages and delete all contents?

Edit and convert PDFs

This topic has been closed for replies.

Luke Jennings3

Community Expert

It may be possible to remove all page content natively, but not in Edit mode. Use a preflight fixup to remove the layer where the content resides, if the content is not on a named layer, there is another preflight to give it a name (so it can be removed) Create layer names for all layers without a name. If you do this often, you can combine preflight fixups using the Action Wizard tool.

P

pooman0101Author

Participating Frequently

Thanks luke - is there no option to simply remove all layers? I don't know all the layers, as I did not create the document. So I need something that will simply remove all layers. I don't see this option in pflight?

Luke Jennings3

Community Expert

Sorry for the late response.

is there no option to simply remove all layers? No, I don't see much need to do this, however, you can make a feature request to Adobe and they may add it to a future update. A PDF may or may not have any layers, you can go to View> Show/hide> Navigation panes> Layers, if the Layers panel is empty, you will first need to create them with a preflight- Create different layers for vector, text, image. Once you have layers, click the eyeball icons to hide the layers, save, then go to File> Save-as-other> Optimized PDF> Discard User Data> Discard hidden layer content, save (or use a preflight). This is a work-around that should produce a PDF without any visible content.

P

pooman0101Author

Participating Frequently

It's disappointing that this can't be done natively. In 5 minutes, I wrote a autohotkey script to do it. It should be possible to do this in acrobat pro natively, considering the price of the product.

try67

Community Expert

Not possible. You can only edit one page at a time like this, and even that is not a good idea...

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

You can delete the pages and add new empty pages.

P

pooman0101Author

Participating Frequently

How would delteing all pages and adding new empty pages help? That would mean I need to recreate 2000 blank pages, of different sizes, orientation etc. It would be more time consuming than selecting every page one by one and deleting it's contents, at least then the page size and orientation would be preserved.

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

Use a script for this.

Why want you do this?

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded