How to Remove Highlight from PDF on PC, Mac, Online

Whether you want to share important information with colleagues or annotate texts for study and exams, highlighting is a common way to make text stand out on your PDFs. However, sometimes you might also want to remove highlights from PDF documents, so you can have clean content for a better reading experience.

While it is easy to highlight text on PDF documents, it might be tricky to do the other way around. Many people still don’t know how to remove highlight from PDF. But worry not, here we will show you 3 useful methods, which can successfully remove highlight in PDF on PC, Mac, and online.

The easiest way to remove highlights in PDF on a PC is to use a third-party PDF editor and iTop PDF is the best one that comes in handy. With this full-featured PDF editor, you can easily delete highlights in PDF with just a few clicks.

What makes iTop PDF a must-have software?

• Edit PDF smoothly without hassle
• Convert PDF to any format in high quality
• Split and Merge PDF files easily and quickly
• Add e-signature effortlessly to your PDF

Free Download

Just have a look at the features that make it stand out to remove highlight from PDF.

Remove All Highlights from PDF in One Click

iTop PDF allows you to easily highlight the texts and the other way around. Designed with simplicity in mind, the PDF editor is the best PDF solution for users of all levels. Simply upload the document and you can remove all highlights from PDF in one click.

Support All Types of PDF Documents

iTop PDF can handle PDF types of all sorts. With the OCR converter, it can successfully recognize and extract texts from heavy-formatted PDF, scanned PDF, and more. And you can truly remove highlights from PDF documents without limits.

Erase Highlight in PDF Without Losing Format

While some PDF editors can help you remove highlight from PDF successfully, the document might end up losing format. But iTop PDF allows you to erase highlight while the original format can be maintained. You can export the document with optimized visual quality.

More Editing Features

iTop PDF is a full-featured editor that allows you to edit whatever you want. You can add text/images/comments as you prefer, reduce PDF file size without losing quality, convert PDF to/from other formats, organize and encrypt PDF files, and so much more.

How to Remove Highlight from PDF with iTop PDF

iTop PDF is definitely your go-to choice to highlight PDFs and remove highlights. Here’s how it works.

Step 1. Free download and install iTop PDF on your Windows PC. It is fully compatible with Windows 11, 10, 8 and 7.

Step 2. Click on the Open PDF button to add the PDF you want to remove highlights.

Step 3. Click the highlighted text or area on the document. After the mini editing bar appear, click Delete icon to remove highlights.

Step 4. Click Menu > Save or press Ctrl+S to save your document.

Microsoft Edge, the browser which is compatible with almost all operating systems, can be used as a PDF reader with basic editing features for macOS. It can help you highlight a PDF and delete highlight in PDF with ease. However, its PDF editing features are rather limited. You can only unhighlight text in PDF and there is no way to highlight/unhighlight area with it.

Now let’s see how to unhighlight in PDF with Microsoft Edge.

Step 1. Right-click on the PDF and open it with Microsoft Edge.

Step 2. Select the text you want to highlight. A toolbar will appear and select the Brush icon. Choose the color you want to highlight for the text.

Step 3. Select the texts you want to remove highlight from PDF and choose “None” as the color to delete highlights.

That’s how to highlight a PDF and remove the highlight with Microsoft Edge. Once you’re done, click the “Save” button to apply all the changes to the PDF file. It is worth noting that Microsoft Edge is more of a temporary workaround when you just need to edit PDFs once or twice. And a professional PDF editor like iTop PDF would be a more realistic option to edit PDFs on a frequent basis.

You can also remove highlights from PDF without software installation. Just upload your PDF to SmallPDF, a web-based online PDF editor, and you can easily erase highlight in PDF for free. Besides, it empowers you to compress PDF online, convert/merge/split and make advanced editing in a PDF effortlessly.

However, the web-based service can be rather unstable, depending on your network. It is also quite time-consuming to unload/download a big-sized PDF file after unhighlighting.

So how to remove highlight from PDF with SmallPDF? Here are the steps.

Step 1. Head to SmallPDF online editor.

Step 2. Click on the “Highlight text” button to highlight the text you want.

Step 3. To remove highlights, just click on the highlighted area of text and the Trash icon.

That’s it. Just remember to save your PDF before downloading it. Similarly, SmallPDF online editor only offers basic features, which are suitable for quick editing. And to prevent unnecessary privacy leaks, you might want to avoid uploading confidential documents to the server, just in case.

Why can’t you remove highlight from PDF?

There are plenty of reasons that you can’t remove highlights from a PDF. The most common reason is that either you didn’t select the highlighted text or the PDF editor you used can not recognize the highlighted area.

Is it possible to remove highlight from PDF for free?

Yes, you can remove highlights from PDF for free. You can use a free online PDF editor as introduced above. Or you may try iTop PDF, the best PDF editor software that offers more advanced features for free.

Can you undo the changes in case the highlight was deleted by mistake?

Yes, you can undo the changes when you accidentally deleted the highlight, but only with professional PDF editor software like iTop PDF, Adobe Acrobat, etc. Some online editors like Smallpdf also allow you to undo changes. But with Microsoft Edge on macOS, you will need to highlight the texts again manually.

Conclusion

How to remove highlight from PDF? Here are 3 effective methods to help you delete highlights from PDF documents on Windows, Mac, and online. As you can see, Microsoft Edge and SmallPDF online editor should be stopgap measures, which can be handy when you just want to remove the highlight from a small-size PDF document once or twice. iTop PDF, on the other hand, is a one-stop solution that enables you to erase all highlights in a PDF while maintaining the original format, exporting documents with the best output quality. Most significantly, it’s 100% free to download and use. Just try it and see it yourself!

What makes iTop PDF a must-have software?

• Edit PDF smoothly without hassle
• Convert PDF to any format in high quality
• Split and Merge PDF files easily and quickly
• Add e-signature effortlessly to your PDF

Free Download