Is there a program to reverse black PDF backgrounds to print w/owasting toner?

[James Gagney]

I often need to print PDFs from school which were created with PowerPoint
using a black background - which wastes an excessive amount of toner in
my HP 3600m laser printer.

If I had the original PPT, I would just remove the background.

I have Adobe Acrobat 6 (the writer) but it doesn't seem to have a
"negative" function. Neither could I find it in the HP 3600m printer
driver GUI on Windows.

Is there freeware or a printer driver or an Acrobat option to reverse B&W
printing of a PDF of a series of black background powerpoint slides?

 

[Bear]

I often need to print PDFs from school which were created with
PowerPoint using a black background - which wastes an excessive amount
of toner in my HP 3600m laser printer.

If I had the original PPT, I would just remove the background.

I have Adobe Acrobat 6 (the writer) but it doesn't seem to have a
"negative" function. Neither could I find it in the HP 3600m printer
driver GUI on Windows.

Is there freeware or a printer driver or an Acrobat option to reverse
B&W printing of a PDF of a series of black background powerpoint
slides?

Yes

 

[Tamarisk Grove]

Bear, when did you stop your lies to ACF?

 

[Craig]

Yes

Adobe Professional might have something but, short of that, you can use
Irfanview:
- Open Irfanview
- take a screenshot of the area involved
- paste into Irfanview
- invert colors

hth,

 

[Guest]

Yes

If the PDFs are in effect image files embedded into a PDF container then
one idea is to adopt the suggestion along the lines of Craig's other post
in this thread.

The PDF X-Change viewer has an accessibility feature which can override
many document defaults (but doesnt seem to override embedded images):

From the menu:

Edit -- > Preferences --> Accessibility --> Document Color Options

I presume (dont use, sorry) Acrobat reader has a similar feature?

Anyway if this cannot change the background, then the snapshot tool could
be used to copy into Irfanview per Craig's suggestion.

 

[Axel Berger]

Is there freeware or a printer driver or an Acrobat option to
reverse B&W printing of a PDF of a series of black background
powerpoint slides?

As that seems to happen regularly, you need a scriptable solution. Once
you have that and it runs on its own the number of steps is of lesser
importance. So how about:

1) Convert the PDF to images using pdftoppm from the Xpdf tools.
2) Invert those images with Irfanview and save as .png
3) List the images with "dir /b /on *.png > List.tex"
4) Add a few lines to make a LaTeX source from that list either in the
batch through echo commands or using editor makros.
5) Run pdflatex

Done.
Time about half an hour, or a full one if inexperienced, to set it all
up and something like one mouseclick to run it.

Axel

 

[Axel Berger]

- take a screenshot of the area involved

At screen resolution, i.e. terrible quality

- paste into Irfanview
- invert colors

And repeat for all pages. Personal computers were invented to free
people from repetitive drudgery, modern GUI computers offload repetitive
tasks onto their users. This is supposed to be progress.

Axel

 

[Craig]

At screen resolution, i.e. terrible quality


And repeat for all pages. Personal computers were invented to free
people from repetitive drudgery, modern GUI computers offload repetitive
tasks onto their users. This is supposed to be progress.

Axel

So much for civility.

 

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

Adobe Professional might have something but, short of that, you can
use Irfanview:
- Open Irfanview
- take a screenshot of the area involved
- paste into Irfanview
- invert colors

hth,

You can find something in Adobe Reader, if the stuff is really text: Edit->Preferences->Accessibility->Replace Document Colors.
The foreground and background colors that one wishes to be used can be specified here.

If the document is an image, then you'll have to deal with it as an image, as per other posters' suggestions.