PDF a escala de grises
Convierte todas las páginas a blanco y negro — perfecto para imprimir más barato.
Printing in colour costs several times what printing in black costs, and a great many documents carry colour they do not need — a blue heading, a coloured logo, a chart whose bars only have to be distinguishable. Converting the document to grayscale before it reaches a print queue is a straightforward saving, and it also stops a printer making its own decisions about how to render your colours.
How it converts matters. Where the Ghostscript engine is available the conversion is done properly and the text stays selectable and sharp; where it is not, pages are rendered instead, and rendered pages are images — the text stops being selectable and the file usually grows. The tool tells you which path it took rather than leaving you to notice afterwards.
How it works
- Drop in a PDF.
- Choose the quality.
- Convert, and check whether the result kept its text.
- Download the grayscale PDF.
What people use it for
- Cutting the cost of printing a long document on a colour-charging printer.
- Preparing a document for a black-and-white press or a photocopier.
- Removing colour that would print as unpredictable greys anyway.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my file uploaded to a server?
- No. The file is opened by JavaScript and WebAssembly running inside your own browser tab. It is never uploaded, there is no server-side processing and nothing is stored — closing the tab discards everything.
- Is the text still selectable afterwards?
- It depends which path ran. Converted through the Ghostscript engine, yes — the text is preserved. Rendered as images, no, and the file usually gets bigger. The tool says which happened.
- Can I just tick "print in black and white" in the print dialog?
- You can, and for a one-off print that is simpler. Converting the file is what you want when the document itself should be grayscale — for sending on, for archiving, or so that everyone who prints it gets the same result.
- Will my charts still be readable?
- Check them. Colours that differ in hue but not in lightness — a medium red and a medium green — become the same grey. If the chart relies on colour alone to tell series apart, it will need labels or patterns instead.
- Does grayscale make the file smaller?
- Often, because one channel replaces three, but not always: if the pages had to be rendered to images, the file can grow instead. Run Compress afterwards if size is the actual goal.
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