Convert PDFs to Black&White (Translated from Chinese)

Posted on January 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sometimes, for better performance on printing or reading on E-book readers(especially E-ink

ereaders), we have to convert our PDFs(colored or grayscaled) to black&white(monochrome).
It is easy to convert DJVUs to b&w, using DjView4(I will explain later).
But for PDFs, it is not so easy. The software A-PDF to Black/White(which costs $27) can do
this, but I dont think it worth the money for such a simple function. And my approach is to
convert the PDF to color DJVU first, then convert it to b&w PDF. It works fine(at least for my
own PDFs), and the only disadvantage is that vectored PDFs will be converted to nonvectored(but for printing or e-reading, its OK).
The tools we need are pdf2djvu and DjView4. Debian/Ubuntu users can install them by the
simple command below:
sudo apt-get install pdf2djvu djview4

For users of other Linux distributions or Windows, pdf2djvu is available

onhttp://code.google.com/p/pdf2djvu/, DjView4 onhttp://djvu.sourceforge.net/djview4.html.
Step 1
Suppose the original PDF is color.pdf, then use the command:
pdf2djvu -o color.djvu color.pdf

The default resolution of the output DJVU is 300DPI(sufficient for e-reading), for higher
resolution, you can add the argument dpi=RESOLUTION:
pdf2djvu -o color.djvu --dpi=600 color.pdf

Step 2
Open the color.djvu with DjView4, select File->Export as, then click PDF Options, and check
Force bitonal G4 compression, click OK and were done.

Note. In my experience, if you add the argument monochrome in Step 1 to get monochrome
DJVU directly, the final performance is not so good as the 2-step method above.