pdftk, copying files without taking comments and annotations

Question

I have many PDF files which contain comments and annotations made with Adobe Acrobat Reader. However, it will take many hours to copy these files with the comment being deleted manually.

Does PDFtk provide commands to copy files without taking comments and annotations?

Does this work? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49598797/remove-pdf-annotations-via-command-line — notautogenerated, Oct 01 '21 at 08:42

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 14 '22 at 15:30

1

You can do this with:

cpdf -remove-annotations in.pdf -o out.pdf

answered Sep 14 '22 at 15:30

johnwhitington

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Hi, how can I install `cpdf`? – GoingMyWay Sep 15 '22 at 01:43
From: https://community.coherentpdf.com/ – johnwhitington Sep 15 '22 at 10:43
Great. It works. The commands are simple. – GoingMyWay Sep 15 '22 at 15:27

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 09 '21 at 05:12

One helpful solution is:

$ LC_CTYPE=C && LANG=C
$ pdftk in.pdf output - uncompress | sed '/^\/Annots/d' | pdftk - output out.pdf compress

The out.pdf has no comments and annotations.

Use bash to process on macOS:

LC_CTYPE=C && LANG=C

paperList=papers.txt
rm ${paperList}
ls | cat > ${paperList}

saveDir=../temp_without_annon
mkdir -p ${saveDir}
                                                                                                                                                                                                      130 ↵
while IFS= read -r line
do
    pdftk ${line} output - uncompress | sed '/^\/Annots/d' | pdftk - output  ${saveDir}/${line} compress;
done < ${paperList}

References

pdftk, copying files without taking comments and annotations

2 Answers2