How to make a PDF black and white

Two different jobs

Printing in black and white is a setting on the print job. The PDF itself stays in colour, and only the paper comes out grey. A black and white file is a copy of the PDF where the colour has been taken out, which is what some court, university and grant portals, and some print shops, ask you to send. The first needs no conversion; the second does.

Printing in black and white

Apple's Mac guide to print settings lists a Print in Color option in the Print dialog, which appears only if your printer supports colour printing; turn it off for a black and white print. Other printers offer a black and white setting under their own options instead.

Adobe's Acrobat help describes a Print in Grayscale (Black and White) option in the print dialog. Adobe's help also says the option is not in every version, and that many colour printers offer it in their own Properties dialog instead. Menus change, so look in your own print dialog and its Properties or Preferences button, as of October 2026.

Making a grayscale copy in the browser

The grayscale PDF tool opens one or several PDFs and writes a copy of each with every colour turned into its own shade of grey. There is nothing to set: press Convert to grayscale and download. The copy is named like the original with -grayscale added. The page Convert a PDF to black and white opens the same tool.

• The text stays text. The pages are not turned into pictures. A grey layer that removes colour is drawn over each page, so text can still be selected, searched and copied, and it stays sharp when you zoom in. Links and bookmarks are kept.
• Every colour becomes a grey of the same brightness, in text, drawings and photos alike. Colours of similar brightness, such as a mid red and a mid green, can end up almost the same grey, so check charts and colour-coded tables.
• The file barely changes size. Nothing is drawn again, so there are no page images to add.
• Comments and form fields are drawn by your PDF reader on top of the page, so they can keep their colour. Flatten them into the page first if they must be grey too.

In our test, a generated two-page PDF with red and green boxes and blue text went from 1,219 bytes to 1,698 bytes. Rendering the first page showed 19,084 coloured pixels before and none after, and extracting the text from the result still returned the heading on each page. The result note reads "text still selectable" for every file, including a scan: a scanned PDF is a picture of each page, so it has no text to select in the first place.

Everything happens inside your browser tab, so the document never leaves your device.

What this does not do

When we rendered the result, it came out grey. It is made by drawing a grey layer over the original page content, not by rewriting the colours inside the file, so the colour is still stored underneath. A portal that only looks at how the pages appear will see grey. A checker that reads the colour information stored in the file may still report colour, and for that a converter that turns each page into a grey picture is the only route, at the cost of unselectable text and a bigger file. If a portal has a rule like that, check its instructions first. To make the copy smaller afterwards, use the PDF compressor.

Questions