Home / Highlighting removal after saving

Is it possible to remove highlights from sections of text after the highlights have been saved into the text file? This reader seems great for quickly reading and taking notes in my textbooks, but I’d like to be able to save the sections I’ve highlighted to study later and be able to remove them if I highlighted a section by accident and only noticed after I saved it.

Thanks!

If ‘save into document=true’ in the advanced settings, no highlight can be undone once it is saved. If ‘save into document=false’, the information related to the location of the highlights is saved into a separate file which can be modified. There are two different ways of erasing highlights in this case as far as I know:

1. Find the exact entry in the newly created file associated with the location of the highlight and erase it; this can be ridiculous if you’ve done a lot of highlights already.
2. If the highlights were done by text highlight (not area highlight done by ‘ctrl+mouse then A’), then reapplying the highlight to the exact space will undo it. The color should be matched in this case. This method can be used even if ‘save into document=true’ IF the highlights are not saved yet.

I don’t now any simple way of removing area highlights other than searching the whole text file See the previous thread for more information.

I try it just now find that highlights can’t be delete.Is there anybody knows how to delete highlights when PDF had save?

[LATER EDIT] This thread is now locked as the experimental Sumatrapdf Meta eXtension a.k.a. SMX feature has been retired. It is replaced in latest Pre-Releases by newer, more extensive PDF annotations features.

Usually you are warned NOT to save into file, until you are working on a copy or sure you need to. So first check if SaveIntoDocument is set true then change to false

in advanced options see if you have
SaveIntoDocument = true

change it so it reads

AnnotationDefaults [
HighlightColor = #ffff60
SaveIntoDocument = false
]

IF you have used SumatraPDF with SaveIntoDocument = false then it is easy to edit or delete the .SMX file (deleting it will remove all highlights). This restores the master file without any changes.

IF you use Acrobat / MuPDF or any other highlighting editor (including SumatraPDF SaveIntoDocument = true) then only a third party tool can remove the highlights. (Take a copy in-case it fails to restore the original.)

Since most annotation tools usually append the highlights at the end of the pdf file it is usually a simple case of removing all edits after the EOF marker in the initial file. Many pdf manipulation utilities can do that. Some are beter than others at healing the file such that it matches the source file.

Since it is MuPdf that does the writing it is easy to download a copy of mupdf version 1.14 or 1.15 or 1.16 windows.zip and using a(nnotation) in mupdf-gl easily select the highlights to delete

Highlights and annotation in general are going through masive changes

[LATER EDIT] This thread is now locked as the experimental Sumatrapdf Meta eXtension a.k.a. SMX feature has been retired. It is replaced in latest Pre-Releases by newer, more extensive PDF annotations features.

When you add highlights they are first written to a filename.pdf.smx file

If you see that file you can delete it and the highlights should all disappear, or you can make edits with notepad to remove seperate entries.

Only when you “save as” with older versions would it write them into the pdf.

I am about to test 3.3.12630 to see how that version is currently working

It is different to previous versions in that save annotations does correctly build the smx file however save as is not correctly adding those annotations to the new copy.pdf (which is part of current changes)

This is great, but when I use previous version like v3.2.12280 that could retouch A key remove highlights. But in this version I can’t do this anymove, so I want know is there any way to remove highlights when I haven’t saved the document.

Unfortunatly you can no longer use A to remove (which was a problem with blocks generated using CTRL and left button) the delete function is on its way see below so one quick way to remove is find the correct entry in the smx file and delete that block

the page number is obvious but to see which block you need to use M for measure tool to check it is the one at approx 14 pt across and 6 pt down

Issue raised at

and has now been activated see below

Highlights and annotation in general are going through masive changes

This thread is now locked as the experimental Sumatrapdf Meta eXtension a.k.a. SMX feature has been retired. It is replaced in latest Pre-Releases by newer, more extensive PDF annotations features.