Flatten Annotations
Drop a PDF file here or click to upload
No size limit — large files welcome
🔒 Your files are processed securely and never uploaded to any server.
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What is Flatten Annotations?
Flatten Annotations merges all annotation objects — highlights, underlines, text notes, stamps, ink drawings — into the page's visual content. After flattening, annotations become permanent parts of the page that cannot be moved, edited, or deleted by the reader.
The tool uses pdf-lib's BentoPDF adapter to render each annotation into the page content stream and remove the annotation definition. The visual appearance is preserved; only the interactivity is removed.
How to Use Flatten Annotations
- Upload a PDF by dropping it onto the upload zone.
- Click Flatten Annotations. The tool processes every page, merging annotations into the content.
- Download the result as
annotations-flattened.pdf. Verify that highlights, notes, and stamps are now part of the page.
Why Use Flatten Annotations?
Annotating a PDF is useful during review, but those annotations should become permanent before final distribution. Flattening ensures that highlights, comments, and stamps are visible to every recipient regardless of their PDF reader's annotation support. It also prevents accidental modification of the annotation layer.
Privacy & Security
Your files never leave your browser. The flattening happens entirely on your device. Nothing is uploaded to Racira's servers, no copies are stored in the cloud, and no file data is transmitted at any point.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between this and Flatten Forms?
Flatten Annotations handles review markup (highlights, notes, stamps). Flatten Forms handles interactive form fields (text inputs, checkboxes, dropdowns). Use the one that matches the type of content you need to lock down, or both if your document has each.