Conversion to Only Black & White

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Aristotle74
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Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by Aristotle74 »

I have scanned an old book as a PDF and imported into PDFXE, however the pages are slightly yellow due to age. Is here a way to convert the PDF file into only B&W like the original book? I looked at Conversion tab but it's very confusing if someone simply wants to save a file with only B&W. Thanks.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, Aristotle74

There is little purpose to converting a file to B&W in PDF, since the colors of most items (text, shapes, comments, etc) other than images must be stored in a color format, so no file size savings are found in these formats with the exception of images. If you need to print something in B&W you can do so while printing by choosing the Monochrome option, or using your Printer's inbuilt B&W color option.

With that said, it is possible to convert most base content to a B&W format (not comments however) using the "convert colors" tool on the convert tab. To do this, simply open the dialog, and using the default settings make a single change, enabling the "conversion profile:" "Black and white":
image.png
I hope this helps!

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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carlosmpa
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Re: Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by carlosmpa »

Just to add to Daniel's

To convert comments to B&W, you need to flatten it first, then complete page goes B&W.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

:)
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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jmiller99
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Re: Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by jmiller99 »

What do I need to do to enable a black-and-white conversion profile? All I see are grayscale and color options:
Clipboard01.jpg
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, jmiller99

The Editor pulls this list of color profiles from windows directly. Typically they are added by installing devices (such as monitors or printers) which utilize those colorspaces, but you can also find color profiles online, simply search for new *.ICC color profiles for windows, then use the windows "color management" function to add these profiles to windows. Once they have been added, you may need to restart our Editor for the list to be re-loaded.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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xpdf29349521
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Re: Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by xpdf29349521 »

TrackerSupp-Daniel wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:16 am but you can also find color profiles online, simply search for new *.ICC color profiles for windows
Hi,
not so easy! Actually, after having searched for a while, nothing "easily digestible" can be found, which can be promptly plug-in into color management and later called by PDFX.

In "image world", black-white or B&W means usually something like grayscale, not B and W only. In "document world" this looks a bit different.

One of my "B&W" profiles produces black output -- I deleted it now for good. The Gray Gamma 2.2 (comes with PDFX) works well, but that is grayscale, not B and W reduced.

Not sure what comment means "you need to flatten it first" (see in the comments), as it suggests doing that then it will work; but one other profile of interest is the Adobe Monochrome -- only guessing. However it is not available online -- maybe ships with Photoshop or other (non-free) tools?

Even if B&W conversion would be possible, another question is speed: down converting ~1000 pages documents could take long within PDFX -- if unoptimized by dev team -- whereas externally converted by third party image-processing could provide some advantage. That is not a fault or so of XPDF, but the use case here is rather a question of image processing than PDF document viewer/editor.

The general request - I think - remains: Having a decent (and fast) conversion profile or feature with settings to "trial and error and optimize" in specific document (input) case. Such feature could - maybe - create grayscale, but at such limiting case, that output is nearly black white only -- this might be also acceptable in some cases for some materials (documents).

Kind Regards
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Conversion to Only Black & White

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello xpdf29349521,

Thanks for your comments and feedback.
You would usually only need a set of colour profiles for conversions - so once the initial set up phase is done you should be pretty much done.

And yes - Photoshop or other image cantered products will have more tools for processing images, however we need to make sure that a lot more can be done with PDF files. As such we do not have a strong focus on image processing, however we use libraries that could be improved in the future, and offer faster processing directly in the Editor as well. For the time being this colour conversion tool is not intended to be undergoing great redesign or recoding though, and if you frequently need to change the colours in thousands of pages/images - then you might indeed need a separate image processing tool!

Kind regards,
Stefan
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