Remove all annotations from a PDF document

remove-annotations.sh

pdftk original.pdf output uncompressed.pdf uncompress
LANG=C sed -n '/^\/Annots/!p' uncompressed.pdf > stripped.pdf
pdftk stripped.pdf output final.pdf compress

Sweet! This worked great for me.

Thank for sharing this script, it worked perfectly!

Thank you

sed: RE error: illegal byte sequence
hmmm

Works perfectly! Thank you

It works, thank you very much.
I would suggest using LANG=C sed -i '/^\/Annots/d' uncompressed.pdf to modify the uncompressed.pdf in place.

For those getting the Illegal byte sequence error, try adding LC_CTYPE=C at the beginning of the second command as well

e.g. LANG=C LC_CTYPE=C sed -n '/^\/Annots/!p' uncompressed.pdf > stripped.pdf

Thanks!

Thaank you! Worked great 👍

Just be aware that the annotation text (there is any) remains in the file. It's just not visible any more.

Thanks! Here a for loop for cleaning several pdfs:
for file in *.pdf; do pdftk "$file" output un.pdf uncompress; LANG=C sed -n '/^/Annots/!p' un.pdf > str.pdf; pdftk str.pdf output "$file" compress; echo "Done $file"; done;

This did not work for me. I had to remove all "/Type /Annot" commands as well in sed for the yellow annotations to disappear.

A faster (in-memory) way is to use a shell pipeline:

pdftk in.pdf output - uncompress | sed '/^\/Annots/d' | pdftk - output out.pdf compress

Thank you! It is cool!

Be aware that pdftk requires gcj, which was deprecated in 2017. This is old software that needs to be updated.

Just for convenience for anyone finding this via google like me: This is the code to remove all annotations from all pdfs in a directory.

# these are needed on Mac
export LC_CTYPE=C
export LANG=C

# cd /directory/with/pdfs/

for file in *.pdf
do
    outname=`sed -e "s/\.pdf$/_.pdf/"<<<"$file"`
    pdftk $file output - uncompress | sed '/^\/Annots/d' | pdftk - output $outname compress
    echo "$file: done"
done

Is it possible to reduce the opacity?

this leave me with a PDF with a broken xref table :(

pdfcpu annotations remove my.pdf

works reasonably well :)
https://pdfcpu.io/annot/annot

Still works!