Skip to content
DontTouch My Doc.
DontTouchMyDoc / Tool · 04

Remove line numbers.

Strip the 1-through-28 gutter from court transcripts and legal filings. Drop the PDF, we detect the line-number column, and hand back a copy with those numbers whited out. The body text, formatting and pagination stay exactly where they were.

Privacy · Enforced No sign-up No watermarks No page limits

Drop the transcript here.

Or . Works on text-based PDFs — court transcripts, legislative drafts, annotated editions.

No OCR · no uploads · text-based PDFs only

§02 · Procedure

How the removal works.

Three steps. None of them involve a server.

  1. Step 01 1

    Open the PDF.

    Drop a text-based PDF. We scan each page's text layer locally using PDF.js — no OCR, no uploads.

  2. Step 02 2

    We detect numbers.

    Digit-only text items in the leftmost margin are flagged as line numbers. You'll see a preview with markers before committing.

  3. Step 03 3

    Download the clean file.

    We white out each detected number with pdf-lib, preserving everything else. The output is a regular PDF, no watermarks.

§04 · FAQ

Remove line numbers · FAQ.

Short answers. Anything missing? Tell us.

What kinds of PDFs does this work on?
Any text-based PDF with digit-only line numbers in a left-margin column. That covers most modern court transcripts, legislative drafts and academic editions. Scanned PDFs — where the numbers are part of a page image — need OCR first, which this tool doesn't do.

How can I tell if my PDF is text-based or scanned?
Try to highlight and copy a line of text in your PDF viewer. If you can, it's text-based. If the whole page acts like one big image, it's a scan.

Why didn't it find my line numbers?
Two common causes: (1) the PDF is scanned, so there's no extractable text; or (2) the numbers are far from the left edge. Try toggling the "wider search column" option to push the search zone further right.

Does it remove the vertical rule between the numbers and the text?
No. That rule is a vector path, not text — removing it reliably without damaging the rest of the page is out of scope for a tool that promises not to touch your content. Most readers are used to the bare rule.

Will the line numbers come back if I OCR the output?
No. We whiteout the number's bounding box in the PDF page, which is a visible change. OCR over the output won't re-discover the numbers because they're visually gone.

Is the original file modified?
Never. Your input file is untouched — we produce a fresh copy with the line numbers removed. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored server-side (there is no server).
§05 · See also

Other tools.

Merge PDFs.

Combine files, keep your order.

Split PDF.

Pull pages out, one or in ranges.

Organise pages.

Rearrange, rotate, delete.

Compress PDF.

Make files smaller. No cloud.

Redact PDF.

Black out sensitive bits, for real.