Convert Color PDF to Black and White

None of the previously posted options worked for me.  Converting to greyscale, etc.

What worked was going to print, choose printer options or quality, then choose custom under print quality and then turn down the toner level from 8 to 1.

Worked like  charm.  No more grey.  I had some CAD drawings that for some reason they set the background to light grey. The USPTO won't accept any grey in the background.  This removed all the light grey and turned it to white.

I had the same problem when I converted a 264 book created in 'Apple Pages' to PDF and then sent it to a commercial printer, who pointed out that this was a SERIOUS PROBLEM that might well mean the book could not be published. None of the forum suggestions worked, but by chance I found reference to a programme called 'Quite a box of Tricks' in a 17 year old manual from Adobe!

Despite the age of this book, I found that this programme is still available from www.quite.com. It downloaded in about 60 seconds and despite my initial scepticism, when I ran it on my file, all the text in the book was converted to pure black in 27 seconds - and unlike other solution ideas I tried, IT STAYED BLACK!

Downsides are 1. that it costs £150 and as it is a plug in for Adobe Acrobat, you need to have that programme too and 2. it will convert ALL text (except that set inside photos) to black, so if you have red/white/blue highlights in your work, you won't have them after the programme has done its job! Colour photos etc remain untouched.

Absolutely brilliant programme though and well worth it if your files are important!

If you have the means it is very simple.

Color PDF to Black & White PDF

Open the color PDF in Photoshop. Go to the menu up top...  Image> Adjustments> Black & White> Presets> Maximum Black> OK> (save or print)

Most of the methods mentioned in this thread will usually only produce a simulated gray scale image and it's not real pretty. It will look like your laser-jet is low on toner, if you will. The method I described here will give you a very crisp, all black & white image / PDF.

Dear all,

Simply open file using chrome then print using Adobe PDF (select B/W).

Goodluck.

For any new searchers, the easy option whilst preserving meta-data (re-frying through PS destroys meta-data) is:

-Acro 9 and previous I think it was under menu Advanced : Preflight

-Acro X and later, go to the Tool section, and look for Print Production section, then Preflight

Under the PDF fixups, you should have Convert to Grayscale

This should force save a new copy, so your original remains untouched.

Preflight has a number of other useful compatibility tools and stuff to clean up your PDFs' binary, I highly recommend investigating this area :-)

--AnTai

Though you are asking about Acrobat 7.0, this post describes how to do this very well in Acrobat 9 Pro.  Maybe older versions are supported as well.

http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2009/10/converting-color-pdf-to-greyscale-pdf-an-update/

The easiest way would probably be to print to a .ps file using a B/W PPD and the distilling the resulting file back to a PDF.