Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt (Nuno J. Silva)
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: PDF: convert to grayscale
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:10:16
Message-Id: 871v2tfwpz.fsf@ist.utl.pt
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] PDF: convert to grayscale by Alex Schuster
1 Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> writes:
2
3 > Grant Edwards writes:
4 >
5 >> On 2011-02-08, Nuno J. Silva <nunojsilva@×××××××.pt> wrote:
6 >> > Does anyone know a tool (other than ghostscript) that is able to
7 >> > convert a PDF (or postscript) to grayscale?
8 >> >
9 >> > Ghostscript does this, but is unable to convert gradients and fills
10 >> > (they're replaced by bitmaps) which results in a too big file unless I
11 >> > drastically reduce quality.
12 >>
13 >> I don't understand what you're asking for. What sort of output format
14 >> do you want (raster, vector, ???)?
15 >
16 > I think he wants the same PDF as the original file. Only in grayscale.
17
18 Yeah, that's it. I ended up hacking the PDF to convert all RGB to
19 grayscale, but even if the result was the original without colors (what
20 I wanted), converting it to ghostscript made some text unreadable (white
21 on white), so it was clearly not a good idea to trust it to look the
22 same everywhere.
23
24 I gave up and used the color version.
25
26 > This is one method to do this, but it needs Acrobat 8 Professional:
27 > http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2007/05/convert-color-pdf-to-grayscale.html
28
29 Thanks for the link. Although I don't have Acrobat, if I ever happen to
30 get access to it I'll probably check that feature :-)
31
32 --
33 Nuno J. Silva
34 gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg