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Convert a PDF to grayscale

Your PDF is converted in this tab and never sent anywhere. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged.

Printing a colour PDF on a shared printer often bills as colour even when the page is mostly text, and some print shops refuse colour files outright. This converts each page to genuine grayscale in your browser and shows you the real before-and-after file size rather than a marketing promise.

Drop your files here

Loading the tool…

how your file is handled

  • It is read, not uploaded. The file is opened by JavaScript running in this tab and processed in memory, in a background worker.
  • The page cannot send it anywhere. This site is served with a Content-Security-Policy whose connect-src is 'self', so no script on the page is permitted to contact another server, even by mistake.
  • You can check it yourself. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab and convert a file: nothing is sent. Or turn off your Wi-Fi first, because these tools keep working offline.

how to use it

  1. 01Drop your PDF onto the box above.
  2. 02Choose a resolution. 200 DPI suits most documents; 300 DPI is better for small text.
  3. 03Check the first-page preview, convert, then download.

questions

Will the text still be selectable afterwards?
No, and this is the honest trade-off. Each page is rendered to an image, so text can no longer be selected or searched, and links, form fields and bookmarks are lost. If you need those, keep the original and use this copy for printing.
Will the file get smaller?
It depends entirely on the source. Scanned and photo-heavy PDFs usually shrink substantially. A PDF that is mostly text and vector graphics often comes out larger, because crisp text stored as outlines becomes a page-sized image. The actual before and after sizes are shown for each file, so you can decide.
Is this real grayscale or just a colour image that looks gray?
Real grayscale. Each page is embedded as a DeviceGray image with one channel, rather than a colour image with equal red, green and blue values. That matters for printing, because a printer receiving a colour image may still use colour ink to reproduce it.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. Rendering and conversion both happen in this tab. The site is static, with no server that could receive the file, and its Content-Security-Policy restricts connect-src to 'self'. It works with the network switched off.

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