How do you convert and print from a Adobe PDF to Doc?

Convert PDFs to grayscale?

• Help me convert PDF files that should be grayscale, but are actually in color. I run a print-for-pay shop, and our preferred file format for submitted print jobs is PDF. All of our printers are capable of discerning color pages from grayscale; grayscale pages count as a black click, and a page with even one pixel of color counts as a color click. This generally works fine for us, and documents printed directly from MS Office (Word, Publisher, Excel) print exactly as they should, and PDF files created by MS Office, Open Office, and really just about anything but Adobe products also print exactly as they should; color pages count as color and grayscale pages count as a black click on our printers. The problem is Adobe's apparent inability to produce a truly grayscale PDF. We receive files all the time from graphic designers using In Design and other Creative Suite apps, and in the majority of them, the "black" is not actually K100, it's rich black. This is an issue, as this will make the page count as a color click (as it should). This becomes a huge problem, as there is a large price difference between 10,000 color prints and 10,000 black prints. For the life of me, I cannot get these PDFs converted to a truly grayscale PDF with no C, M, or Y content, just K. I've tried re-"print"ing it using the Adobe PDF printer and selecting "Black and White", I've set my color profile to Gray, and the output file still has rich blacks (and therefore, color content). I've tried running them through Distiller again, with everything I can find set to grayscale. The weird thing is, if I create a color PDF from say Word, and re-process that PDF in the same way (open the color PDF, re-"print" the PDF in black and white), it works perfectly. It's only with documents that were originally created by an Adobe app that just will not convert. I suspect that it's some stupid embedded color profile issue, and we've taken this issue to the Adobe User's Group meetings a couple times and they don't even have an answer. Often the job will involve a color cover page followed by grayscale interior pages, but the PDF will have rich black on the interior pages, which would make them all count as color. My ghetto solution so far has been to use GhostScript (psmono) to convert the PDFs to mono PS files, and then use Distiller to make those back into PDFs. I then take this grayscale PDF, and use the customer's original PDF file to insert color pages where needed. This makes the printers work as intended, the color pages count as color clicks and the now truly grayscale pages count as black clicks, and the customer is happy. It works, sort of, except that this process rasterizes all the pages instead of keeping the text as text (outlines, or whatever its original form was). This makes the files huge, generally 10-15x the size of the original PDF. The minor drawback is that this makes the jobs take forever to RIP on our printers; the major drawback is that because the entire page is rasterized and the text is no longer text, the auto-trapping features on our Fiery controllers are now useless. This is a necessity for several jobs that we run. It's not as easy as just setting our print driver to grayscale, while that does make the pages count as black clicks, it makes everything come out grayscale; obviously this is not an option for jobs with a mix of color and black pages. We also cannot print the grayscale pages separately from the color pages; when printing thousands of sets with intermingled pages it's clear why this is not a solution. tl;dr, Is there a way, using GhostScript or some other tool, to somehow convert a PDF to a truly grayscale output, while keeping the text as text instead of rasterizing the entire page? Is there a parameter for pdfwrite that I can set that will force output to grayscale?

• Answer:

  Ghostscript can do it: $ gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile=grayscale.pdf color.pdf So can http://www.ehow.com/how_6076580_convert-colors-acrobat-6-pro.html, which is probably a better option, as Ghostscript converted PDFs can be a bit funny sometimes.