Removing a single or all highlights from PDF files in DT3

DEVONthink
#1

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

#2

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?).

#3

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.

  • Select a highlighted word in a highlighted passage and choose Format > Highlight or press Shift-Command-L. The highlight will be removed from the passage.
  • Select the highlight in the Document > Annotations inspector and press the Delete key
#4

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?

#5

Not ours, it’s PDFkit again.

#6

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.

#7

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.

#8

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?

#9

At lot of things which Preview does are actually not possible via the public PDFkit framework.

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#10

You’re welcome. Glad the suggestions are useful :slight_smile:

#11

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.

#12

The next release of DEVONthink will handle this on its own (as the PDFkit’s implementation seems to be broken forever).

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#13

Will the functioning Take Note command still be available? Just curious.

#14

Sure, no reason to remove it.

1 Like