Grayscale PDF

How to convert a PDF to grayscale

Colour printing costs more than black-and-white printing, and colour scans are larger than grey ones. Converting a PDF to grayscale is the fix for both: a report that will be printed on an office printer, a scan that only needs to be readable, or a document you want to send in the smallest possible size. This tool converts every page of your PDF to black and white.

Drop a PDF and press Convert. Each page is rendered and converted to grey, then rebuilt into a new PDF. The result is a document that prints cleanly on any black-and-white printer and is usually smaller than the colour original, because grey images compress better than colour ones. Charts and photos lose their colour, but stay readable — a blue line and a red line in a chart will become two different shades of grey, so check that they are still distinguishable before printing an important chart.

One honest limitation: this tool rebuilds the PDF from page images, so the text in the output is part of the image and can no longer be selected or searched. For a document that will only be printed or read, that does not matter; for a document you still need to search, keep the colour original. The page images are rendered at high resolution, so printed text stays sharp.

Everything runs in your browser, so the document never leaves your device. There is no daily limit. If the result is still too large, run it through the Compress PDF tool afterwards and pick a target size.

How to use this tool

1. 1Drop a PDF file onto the page.
2. 2Press Convert to Grayscale.
3. 3Download the black-and-white PDF.