Participating Frequently

Question

Convert PDF to 100% black and white (NOT grayscale)?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 11, 2021
5 replies
57764 views

Does Acrobat Pro have a way to convert PDFs to true black and white? When I look in the "convert colors" function in print production it has grayscale, but I don't see black and white as an option. I've been searching for fixes and every tutorial and question/answer I find only converts to grayscale; does Acrobat not have the capability to convert to ture black and white?

Edit and convert PDFs

J

jordan_9787

Participant

I couldn't figure out how to do it in Acrobat, but I was able to convert the file to a word doc and then go into the color scale in word, choose a black and white that worked with my background, and then convert that to a PDF.

K

kathleen_7434

Participant

I recall doing this in the late 1990s with a slider to choose the cutoff for readability and got clear black text on white with bit of black shadows in the corners. Dunno what program. Too bad Adobe cant be bothered.

M

mario27188307sq8h

Participant

I do not believe there is. I have an app called Snag It Editor. I had to save my pdf as images, and then click Color Adjustment. Worked like a charm. Hope this helps.

Abambo

Community Expert

Please see here… same remarks, more or less: https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/convert-pdf-to-100-black-and-white-not-grayscale/m-p/13352849#M387483

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

try67

Community Expert

Yes, it is possible. Here's how:

- Download this file (I can't attach it here directly, unfortunately).

- In Acrobat (Pro), go to Tools - Print Production - Preflight.

- Click Options - Import Preflight Profile and select the file you downloaded earlier.

- A new item will appear under Custom Profiles, called "Convert to B&W".

- Open your PDF file and then run this Preflight Profile on it by clicking on "Analyze & Fix".

- When it's done save the new file under a new name, and you're done!

S

sandrah80731053Author

Participating Frequently

I ran this through preflight, and it gave the response "Preflight profile "Convert to BW" did not find any errors or warnings", but it also didn't seem to change the file at all, it is still grayscale. My goal is to convert text scanned in grayscale over to 000000/FFFFFF and nothing else.

try67

Community Expert

I understood your request, and it's working well for me... Maybe the fixup it uses needs to be created manually.

Are you able to edit it? It's called "Convert color to B&W".

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Sandrah,

Just out of curiosity, what is your goal, what are you hoping to achieve?

FWIW, B&W and grayscale are almost synonymous. I say "almost" becuase absolute B&W means that all antialiasing is converted to black as well. This is text at 200% the top one has antialiasing the bottom one is converted to absolute B&W. Are you sure you want that?

C

Cerbo24878402260w

Participant

It's difficult to understand when we are sure to know everything... What is "black and white" ? For many people, it is what Google do with Google Books. Take a look. You have scanned books where the paper is brown, old, then the page of the PDF generated by Google is TOTALLY white, only the letters are black. This is "black and white" for many of us... And you will see (if you are not blind), it is not, not "almost", not "a few", not "a little", greyscale... Greyscale is less useful for reading, and also it is causing problems with printing (but I don't think you print and read any books in your life...)... So when people ask "black and white", say "Adobe cannot do what Google do", even if Adobe create a "new" version of his software each year and sell it 1000€/year... and not "people you are dumb, know what you do, use greyscale, etc."....

gary_sc

Community Expert

Cerbo,

You never did tell me what the "end goal" of your B&W desire was for. But, if your goal was to "get the brown out," then 2-bit conversion is NOT the best way to do that.

And OCR software does work better with grayscale than it does with 2-bit color.

So, do you want quality text, white backgrounds, and easy to both read text and better OCR or do you want 2-bit text?

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