GUIDE
Deleting things
from a PDF drawing.
A superseded revision cloud, a wrong note, a consultant’s old markup. Removing it depends on what it actually is — and PDFs hold two very different kinds of thing.
First: is it an annotation, or is it the page?
Everything you see on a PDF drawing is one of two things:
- Annotations — markups added on top by a reviewer in another PDF tool: clouds, comments, stamps, boxes. They sit in a layer of their own and can be selected individually.
- Page content — the drawing itself, printed from CAD: walls, text, dimensions, title block. Also anything that was "flattened", which permanently merges a markup into the page.
The quickest test: if another tool lets you click it and see a properties box, it is an annotation. If clicking does nothing, it is page content.
Deleting annotations
Open the drawing in Redline and it offers to import the annotations the PDF already carries. They become ordinary markups: select one, check who wrote it and when, and delete it — or restyle it, reply to it, or change its status. Export afterwards and the deleted ones are gone from the file. This is the right route for a superseded revision cloud someone added as a markup.
Erasing page content
When the thing is part of the drawing — a flattened cloud, an obsolete note printed from CAD, a line that should not be there — use Erase content. Drag a box over it, or click a single word to erase exactly that word. On export, the page's own content is clipped so the erased area is genuinely absent in every viewer, at any zoom, while your markups drawn over it stay intact. Redline records the words removed alongside the erase, so the change is auditable.
Erasing is not redaction
Worth being precise: erasing hides content in every viewer, but the underlying bytes remain in the file, so a forensic tool could still recover text from it. That is fine for tidying a drawing. It is not sufficient for removing confidential information before sending a file outside your organisation — that needs certified redaction, which is a different operation.
Hiding a whole layer instead
If the CAD export put revision clouds on their own PDF layer — often named REV, CLOUDS or A-ANNO-REVC — you can switch that layer off and it disappears from the view and from the export. Layers can be hidden rather than deleted; that is a property of PDF, not of any one tool.
Open the demo and try it on the sample drawing — no account needed.
Try it on the sample drawing
Redline runs in the browser — nothing to install. Open the demo to try tools on a sample drawing. Demo edits are temporary; your own files, saving, signatures, exporting, printing and downloads come with the seven-day trial, which takes no card. After it you keep Redline Free, or choose Pro at $15 a month or $150 a year. Compare the plans.
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