Grayscale PDF

Convert a color PDF to black and white (grayscale) before you print it, send it to a print shop or archive it. Text stays sharp and selectable, and you see the result before you download it. Free, no watermark, and your file never leaves your browser.

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Method
Image quality

Which method should I pick?

Method	What it does
Keep text	Adds a gray color filter on top of every page, inside the PDF. Photos, charts, colored text and backgrounds all show and print in shades of gray, at the same brightness as before. Text stays selectable and searchable, links keep working, and the file barely grows. Best for printing at home or at the office, and for sharing.
Gray images	Draws each page as a true grayscale image (no color data left at all) and builds a new PDF from them. For print shops or upload forms that reject any color. Text is no longer selectable; links and form fields are lost.

Why convert a PDF to grayscale?

Printing in black and white saves colored ink and toner, and many printers still use some color ink for "black" when the file contains color. Print shops charge per color page, and some will bill a whole document as color because of one blue logo. Some application portals, courts and archives also ask for grayscale scans. Converting first means you know exactly how the pages will look: low-contrast colors such as light green on yellow can become nearly invisible in gray, and the preview shows that before you print.

How it works

Keep-text mode uses pdf-lib to add a white backdrop under each page and a full-page rectangle with the PDF Saturation blend mode on top of it. The blend keeps each color's brightness and removes its hue, which is what a grayscale conversion is, and every PDF viewer that supports transparency shows it the same way (Acrobat, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, macOS Preview). The original colors are still stored underneath, so a preflight check that reads the color space will still find them: use gray images for that. Comments and form fields that the viewer draws on top of the page are not filtered. Gray-images mode uses pdf.js, the PDF engine built into Firefox, to draw each page at the DPI you pick, converts the pixels to gray and stores them as 8-bit DeviceGray images at the original page size, so the page count and dimensions don't change. Password-protected PDFs can't be converted here: unlock them first.

Making PDFs from web pages or HTML?

If your PDFs come from web pages or HTML templates (invoices, reports, tickets), the Shotmint API renders them in Chromium with real, selectable text:

curl "https://shotmint.creasework.com/v1/pdf?url=https://example.com&format=A4" -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" -o page.pdf

Each render is 1 credit. €5 buys 2,000 with no subscription, and credits never expire. Try HTML to PDF or URL to PDF without a key.

Get 25 free renders a month API docs

FAQ

Is my PDF uploaded? No. Everything runs in JavaScript on this page, so contracts, bank statements and ID scans stay on your device.

Is black and white the same as grayscale? Most "print in black and white" options mean grayscale: shades of gray from white to black. Pure black and white (1-bit, no grays) makes photos unreadable, so this tool keeps the grays.

Will my printer still use color ink? With either method the pages contain only gray tones when printed. For the strictest result, pick gray images, or also choose "Grayscale" in your print dialog.

Will the file get bigger? Keep text adds well under 1 KB per page. Gray images is usually bigger than the original for text documents and can be smaller for scans; pick 150 DPI for a smaller file.

Is there a size limit? No limit and no watermark. Very large PDFs depend on your device's memory.

Grayscale PDF

Which method should I pick?

Why convert a PDF to grayscale?

How it works

Making PDFs from web pages or HTML?

FAQ

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