Hello,
Can’t find an answer to these questions in the forums: 1) how can I delete a single highlight from a PDF? CTRL-Click gives me an option in the contextual menu for a highlight, but it isn’t visibly removing the highlighting where the cursor is located. I can delete highlights using the list of annotation. 2) how can I remove all highlights and annotations from a PDF file? Is there a command (hidden) or script?
Thanks in advance,
Francis
I can confirm that; the Remove Highlight feature seems to do nothing (@BLUEFROG I created a highlight in a PDF using the appropriate command in the context menu in DT, and then attempted to remove that same highlight using the Remove Highlight command from the context menu - both not marking and marking the highlight beforehand; nothing happens. I assume this is a bug?).
That is not a DEVONthink command. It’s from macOS. Those at the top are, though @cgrunenberg would have to answer if the Take Note is ours or not as it does function.
Yes, these two approaches do remove a highlight. Thanks. As @Blanc confirmed, the contextual menu command “Remove Highlight” does not.
Also, my second question was overlooked so far: 2) how can I remove all highlights and annotations from a PDF file? Is there a command (hidden) or script?
Not ours, it’s PDFkit again.
Why don’t you select all the (unwanted) annotations in the Document > Annotations inspector and press the Delete key?
As a secondary mechanism, you could also use Data > Convert > to PDF without Annotations. However, this will generate a new file so you’d likely want to remove the old one.
Thank you! I feel like the obvious was staring me in the face…
Both would work perfectly for my need–preparing PDFs cleaned of my notes for students to work with.
I was wondering PDFkit is playing nice with DT3. I don’t program with it, but I checked in Preview and the contextual menu “Remove Highlight” works there. Might be some profound incompatibility?
At lot of things which Preview does are actually not possible via the public PDFkit framework.
You’re welcome. Glad the suggestions are useful 
It would be good to be certain. In any case, I would put a vote in for removing menu items that don’t or can’t work.
The next release of DEVONthink will handle this on its own (as the PDFkit’s implementation seems to be broken forever).
Will the functioning Take Note command still be available? Just curious.
Sure, no reason to remove it.
Not sure if this is the right thread, but is there a function for supressing the highlights of a PDF or other document?
For example, I highlight notes in a PDF textbook, but want to send the same page or section to others without the highlighted section.
In the Goodreader app I used to have, it had a suppress highlight function which was very helpful.
I understand the ability to delete individual highlighting, or convert to PDF without highlight are helpful tools, but if there is a lot of highlighting to remove on a single PDF, a “remove all highlighting” option would be helpful too.
Or, have I completely missed this option somewhere?
Maybe Data > Convert > to PDF without Annotations is what you’re looking for?
Yes I saw that option. But as Jim mentioned above, it would create another document, which would then have to be deleted or something similar, adding another step into the workflow.
It’s not a bad option though and Im sure I could get used to it. It’d just be nice if there was a “suppress annotations” option, which is my thought.
Thanks again!