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Converting Color PDF To Greyscale PDF (An Update)

This document discusses how to convert color PDF documents to grayscale or black and white formats in Adobe Acrobat 9 to reduce file sizes and speed up printing. It explains how to convert individual documents and batches of documents using preflight droplets. It also provides a workaround for converting documents to monochrome format.

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stanimirovic.ivan
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39 views

Converting Color PDF To Greyscale PDF (An Update)

This document discusses how to convert color PDF documents to grayscale or black and white formats in Adobe Acrobat 9 to reduce file sizes and speed up printing. It explains how to convert individual documents and batches of documents using preflight droplets. It also provides a workaround for converting documents to monochrome format.

Uploaded by

stanimirovic.ivan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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9/20/2020 Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)

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Acrobat for Legal Professionals


The Acrolaw Blog is a resource for lawyers, law firms, paralegals, legal IT pros and anyone interested in the use of Acrobat in the legal community. Rick
Borstein, blog author, is a Principal Solutions Consultant with Adobe Systems Incorporated.

HOME Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)

Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)


Converting Color PDFs to Grayscale or Black and White in Acrobat 9

It’s rare to find color printers or copiers widely deployed in law firms. When color documents appear in discovery, firms don’t always know what to do with them.
Examples include PPT files, images scanned in full color, etc.

Acrobat files can contain color and non­color elements:

RGB: Red, Green, Blue color


CMYK: Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black
Greyscale: Shades of gray ranging from 0 (white) to to 256 (black) in value
Monochrome: Black and White

RGB or CMYK image­only PDFs, in particular, can be quite large. Converting these PDFs to grayscale or black can reduce the size of the file and speed printing.

Other times, litigation support departments will have to satisfy the odd attorney who prefers to read grayscale documents.

Whatever the reason, it is fairly easy to convert RGB or CMYK PDFs to Greyscale. It’s a bit more difficult to convert to monochrome, but I’ve included a workaround for
that, too.

You’ll need Acrobat Pro to make this work for you . . .

Converting PDFs from Color to Grayscale

To convert an RGB PDF to Grayscale

1. Open a color PDF.


2. Choose Advanced—> Preflight in Acrobat 9 Pro
In Acrobat X Pro, choose the Print Production panel, then choose Preflight
3. Twirl open the PDF Fixups area

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9/20/2020 Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)

4. In the Preflight window


A) Choose the Convert to grayscale fixup
B) Click the Analyze and Fix button

5. Acrobat will ask you to name the file and allow you to choose a location to save it.

Converting many Color PDFs to Grayscale using a Preflight Droplet

A preflight droplet is an intelligent icon you can drag and drop files to for conversion.

Follow these steps to create a Preflight droplet:

1. Choose Advanced—> Preflight


2. Twirl open the PDF Fixups area and select Convert to Grayscale
3. Locate the Options button:

4. Click on the Options button and choose Create New Preflight Droplet

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9/20/2020 Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)

5. The Droplet Setup window appears. You can adjust many options:

A) Choose a folder where you wish to place converted PDFs


B) Choose a folder for any PDFs which do not convert

Note: There are many other options here for reporting.

6. Click the Save . . . button and save the droplet file to your desktop. It looks like this:

Using the Convert to Grayscale Preflight Droplet

To use the droplet, you need to drag and drop files onto it.

Select the files you wish to convert and drag them on top of the preflight droplet:

Note: Preflight droplets cannot process folders. You can use Batch Processing to convert entire folders (and subfolders) to grayscale. Choose Advanced—>
Document Processing—> Batch Processing . . .
One of the Batch commands available is Preflight.

Converting to Monochrome

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9/20/2020 Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)
Unfortunately, Acrobat cannot convert documents to monochrome directly. The workaround is to convert to monochrome TIFF and then re­convert to Acrobat.

This process works well for image­only color PDFs. PDF Normal documents— containing vector fonts and text— will no longer be searchable unless OCR is
performed after conversion.

To convert a PDF to Monochrome TIFF

1. Choose File—> Export—> Image —> TIFF


2. Click the Settings button
3. Set as below:

Acrobat will convert each page to an individual TIFF file numbered sequentially:

To recombine the files:

1. Click the Combine button in the Acrobat toolbar and choose Merge Files into a single PDF . . .

2. The Combine Files window opens. Click the Add Files . . . button at the top of the window.

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9/20/2020 Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)

3. Locate the file or folder of files you wish to combine.


4. Click the Combine files button.

One Response to Converting Color PDF to Greyscale PDF (An Update)

Pingback: Ranga‘s Blog » Blog Archive » Convert Color PDF to Grayscale

By Rick Borstein

Comments (1)

Created
October 6, 2009

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