Optimize & secure guide
Grayscale a PDF to Cut Printing Costs
Updated
Short answer: Drop the PDF into Grayscale PDF, download the black-and-white copy and print that instead of relying on the printer's grayscale setting.
Printing a colour PDF in black and white seems like it should be a printer setting, and often it is. But drivers handle it inconsistently, some printers still draw on colour toner to make “rich black”, and print shops may charge colour rates for any page with colour on it.
Step by step
Step 1: Open Grayscale PDF and drop the colour document.
Open Grayscale PDF(runs on our server)Step 2: Download the -grayscale copy and scroll through it on screen to check charts and highlights are still readable.
Step 3: If you'll print several pages per sheet, do that next.
Open Multiple pages per sheet(runs on your device)Step 4: Print the grayscale file. Most drivers will then use black toner only.
Why this works, and what to watch for
Grayscale PDF uses Ghostscript to convert every colour in the file, in text, vector graphics and images, to a single shade of grey based on its brightness. Pages are not turned into pictures, so text stays sharp and selectable. Photos become black-and-white images, and the file often gets a little smaller because a grey image needs one channel instead of three.
Why it saves money: printers make black in different ways. When a page contains colour, many laser and inkjet printers build dark areas from cyan, magenta and yellow as well as black, and some use colour even for grey tones. A file that contains no colour at all gives the driver nothing to mix, so it uses the black cartridge. Copy shops and office print accounting often bill a page as colour if it contains a single coloured pixel; a grayscale file is billed as mono.
What to watch for is anything that relied on colour to carry meaning. A red line and a green line in a chart can become nearly the same grey, because they have similar brightness. Highlighted text may turn into a grey band that makes the words harder to read. Check those pages before printing a stack, and where a chart becomes ambiguous, it may be worth printing that page in colour.
Combined with Pages per sheet, savings add up quickly: slides or a long report at four pages per sheet in grayscale use a quarter of the paper and none of the colour toner.