Whether it's an inconvenient watermark, crop mark, or some other type of special mark, you may find that at some point, you need to remove special marks from a PDF document. Since PDF documents are the standard for business documents - and their file format are intended not to be editable - this can be a daunting task. However, you can use Adobe Acrobat to get rid of watermarks and remove crop marks from PDF documents with relative ease. Here's how.
You can remove crop marks from PDF documents in Adobe Acrobat. Ironically, crop marks can be removed most easily by "cropping" them out of your PDF document entirely. To crop PDFs, Acrobat uses a pretty standard cropping tool. Here's how to crop PDF Acrobat files:
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This method should remove crop marks from PDF documents that are along the margins of a document with Adobe Acrobat. Crop marks that show up inside other groups of text, however, will need to be removed with a more precise method. To do so, in Adobe Acrobat, go to Tools, followed by Content Editing to select the Edit Text and Images option. From there, highlight and select the individual crop marks you want to remove. Once they are selected in their own highlighted box, hit delete to remove them, and save the revised PDF.
To remove watermarks from a PDF document in Adobe Acrobat, follow these steps.
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If you want to remove multiple watermarks from multiple PDFs in a bulk batch, you can do so by opening Acrobat, and before you Open a specific file, go to Tools and select Edit PDF. From there, select Watermark and then Remove. Since you don't have a file open already, it will ask you to add Files, where you choose the files to add, and click OK. This will remove all the watermarks from the files you selected, and then you choose where to output the new versions by specifying a folder in the Output Options window.
If there are special marks on your PDF document that you can't crop around or aren't an easily removable watermark via Adobe Acrobat, there may be another option to remove them. Sometimes the application used to create a registration mark or other special mark can be removed prior to printing the document to a PDF. For example, in Adobe Illustrator, you can disable crop or registration marks in the Print or Export sections.
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If your PDF document is mostly text with minimal design elements, it may be worthwhile to convert the PDF to a Microsoft Word document to rid it of any annoying marks. To do so, you will need to use a PDF to Microsoft Word converter. You can use the one in Adobe Acrobat through the Export PDF option, find a free PDF to Word converter online, or use the Google Drive workaround to open a PDF document in the drive as a Google Docs file.
Once you convert your PDF to a Microsoft Word doc, any extraneous image or layout design that includes the obnoxious marks will be gone. In fact, as you convert a PDF to a Word document, most of the images and layout design will either be out of place or removed completely. However, for mostly text PDF documents, this will be enough.
To convert this file back into a PDF, you can simply go to File, followed by Save as to export the file as a PDF from Word, or Download as to download the file as a PDF from Google Drive.
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