Black and White PDF

About black and white PDFs

Colour ink is expensive. A school handout, a long report or a set of slides with coloured backgrounds can empty a colour cartridge fast — even when you set the printer to "black only", some printers still mix colours to make grey.

This tool makes a real grayscale PDF: every colour on every page becomes a shade of grey. Your printer then uses only black ink. You can also make it pure black and white — no grey at all — which is the clearest choice for scanned documents, forms and text.

You see page 1 before and after, side by side, so you can adjust it before you convert the whole file.

How to use it

• Click Click to upload, or drop your PDF onto the box
• Choose Grayscale or Pure black and white
• Move Contrast (grayscale) or Darkness cut-off (black and white) and watch page 1 change
• Choose the quality
• Press Convert PDF, then click Download

Grayscale or pure black and white?

• Grayscale keeps every shade, from white to black. Photos, charts and coloured slides stay readable — the colours just become greys. Raise the contrast a little if light colours become too pale.
• Pure black and white turns every point either black or white. It is perfect for text, scanned pages, forms and line drawings: grey paper becomes white, and faint text becomes black. Move the darkness cut-off up if text looks thin, or down if the background shows dark spots.

Which quality?

• Smaller file (100 dpi) — for reading on screen and sending by email
• Normal (150 dpi) — good for most printing
• High (200 dpi) — small print and fine lines
• Print (300 dpi) — the sharpest result, but a bigger file and slower to make

Everything happens on your device

Each page is drawn by pdf.js, turned grey in your browser, and saved into a new PDF with pdf-lib. Your PDF is never uploaded. There is no sign-up, no watermark and no page limit.

One thing to know: because each page is redrawn as a picture, the text in the new PDF can no longer be selected, copied or searched. Keep your original file for that.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert a PDF to black and white?

Upload the PDF, choose Grayscale or Pure black and white, check page 1 in the preview, then press Convert PDF and download the result.

Will this really save ink?

Yes. A grayscale PDF has no colour in it, so the printer uses black ink only. Pure black and white saves even more, because light grey backgrounds become white and are not printed at all.

Why can't I select the text any more?

Every page is redrawn as an image to remove all colour, including colour in pictures and backgrounds. That is why the text becomes part of the picture. Your original PDF is not changed.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. The conversion runs in your browser, on your own device.

Why is the new file bigger than the original?

A PDF made of text is very small; pictures of pages are larger. Choose Smaller file (100 dpi), or make it smaller afterwards with Compress PDF.

Can I convert just a few pages?

Convert the whole PDF, then take the pages you want with Split PDF, or remove the others with Delete PDF Pages.

Good to know

• Page sizes and orientation stay exactly as in the original
• Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked first with Unlock PDF
• Very long PDFs at 300 dpi use a lot of memory; a computer handles them better than a phone

Related tools

• Compress PDF — make a PDF smaller
• PDF to JPG — save each page as an image
• Split PDF — take out the pages you need
• Rotate PDF — turn sideways pages
• Merge PDF — join several PDFs into one
• OCR PDF — make a scanned PDF searchable again