Use the free PDF Annotation Viewer below: your PDF never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
What is hiding in your PDF?
A PDF can carry far more than its visible pages. Reviewers leave comments in the margins. Editors highlight passages. Authors attach notes and links. These extras are called annotations, and they are easy to miss: a small icon in a corner, a highlight you scroll past, a link you never click. Yet annotations often hold the most important part of a document — the reviewer’s objection, the editor’s question, the author’s source.
This tool lists every annotation, page by page, so nothing hides. You see the type — comment, highlight, link or note — and the text or address attached to it, in one plain list you can read through in minutes.
How it works
Upload a PDF and the tool opens it with pdf.js, then asks each page for its annotations. It collects the type of each annotation and any contents, title or link address it carries, and prints them grouped by page. If a PDF has no annotations, it says so plainly instead of showing an empty list.
Everything runs in your browser. The PDF is not uploaded, which is important when the annotations themselves are the sensitive part — review comments on a manuscript, internal notes on a report, or feedback on a draft.
Why annotations matter in real work
In a review round, comments are the work. A manuscript can come back with twenty comments spread across forty pages, and missing one means missing a required change. A list view lets a writer work through them in order, ticking each off, instead of hunting for tiny icons. In legal and compliance work, annotations can record who flagged what and when, and a list makes that record checkable.
Students benefit too. A tutor’s annotated feedback, gathered in one list, reads like a to-do list for the next draft. And for anyone receiving a PDF second-hand, the annotation list answers a quiet question: did someone already mark this up, and what did they say?
Types you will see
Comments and notes carry free text — the reviewer’s words. Highlights mark a passage, sometimes with an attached note explaining why. Links carry a web address or a jump to another page. There are also stamps, shapes and file attachments in some PDFs, which the tool lists by type even when they carry no text. If a highlight has no note, the list still shows it, so you know the passage was marked, and you can open the PDF at that page to see the highlighted words.
One honest limit: this tool lists annotations, it does not show you the exact highlighted words. pdf.js reports the annotation, not the text underneath it. Use the page number in the list to jump to the passage in your PDF reader.
A review workflow
Run the tool on the reviewed PDF first, before you start editing. Copy the list into your notes or print it. Work through it top to bottom, making each change, and mark each item done. When the list is empty, the review is done — not when you think you have seen everything. That discipline is what prevents the classic embarrassment of resubmitting a draft with one reviewer comment unaddressed.
If you are the reviewer, the same list is your quality check. Before you send a PDF back, run it through the tool and confirm your comments are all present and readable. A comment trapped in a broken annotation helps nobody.
Common questions
Why does my PDF show no annotations? Most PDFs have none. Annotations only exist if someone added comments, highlights or links in a PDF editor.
Can I edit annotations here? No. This is a viewer and lister. Edit annotations in a PDF editor, then re-run this tool to verify.
Does it show who wrote each comment? When the PDF stores an author name, the tool shows it as the title. Some PDFs do not store one.
Is my document private? Yes. All processing happens locally in your browser.
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