How can I print out a PDF substituting pixels for blue pixels?

I have no more black ink in my Canon MP560 printer. All other colors print fine. I need to print out an online train ticket. When I print it out, I can't see any of the page that is in black (most of it, all the text). I already printed it as a PDF so I can print it out later if I get some black ink in time. But can anyone think of a creative way to tell the printer / printer driver / PDF software (Foxit) that it should replace all black pixels with e.g. very dark blue pixels so that I can at least print it out so that the barcode on the page can be scanned?

14 Answers 14

Maybe you can set an option in the printer driver to print black as composite from yellow, magenta and cyan.

Do you mean in the printer properties, I find options such as "manual color intensity" but nothing where I could map colors like that.

Yes somewhere in the printer dialogue. What printer do you have? However I do not know what it is called exactly. But basically it is possible to mix black from the 3 other colors.

I have found this for the iP90, maybe this is applicable for your printer, too: "The Canon Pixma iP90 introduces two features: Save Black Ink, which is similar to the Draft mode on other printers in that it reduces that colour's use by the printer; and Use Composite, which you can find in the drivers' Maintenance section under Ink Usage Control. Use Composite instructs the printer to fashion black out of colour ink when the former runs dry. Read more: reviews.cnet.co.uk/printers/canon-pixma-ip90-review-49282171/…"

Converting the color black to blue as in frabjous' answer has the added benefit of saving colored ink. In order to print black from CYM, you'll need a lot of ink.

Install Ghostscript (first) and then ImageMagick, and then you can use the following command:

magick convert -density 300 input.pdf -fill blue -opaque black output.pdf

This will convert all the black in input.pdf with blue in output.pdf .

[Thanks to Nick's comment below for the part about ghostscript.]

Note added later: If you have a newer version of imagemagick that doesn't have a convert binary, use magick convert instead of simply convert .

Be sure to install GhostScript (ghostscript.com) before installing ImageMagick. This will allow it to work with PDF files.

Did perfectly work on text pdf for me, but not for images. For image pdfs convert -density 300 input.pdf +level-colors blue,white output.pdf worked

This (free) website seems to do this without the need to download and install anything: supertool.org/…

There's a free online tool that's built for this very purpose:

It took a little while to load and process, but it made it possible to print a return shipping label without black ink.

An addendum to frabjous' answer requiring Ghostscript and ImageMagick are installed, including the updates according to Alexander Taubenkorb's comment.

This still didn't work because I had the problem that the 'gray' of my image was not pure gray. To overcome this I switch the colorspace “back and forth” to ensure there is a clean definition of ‘gray’ to be converted to blue in that final command.

convert -density 300 input.pdf -colorspace RGB -colorspace Gray tmp1.pdf

convert -density 300 tmp1.pdf -colorspace Gray -colorspace RGB tmp2.pdf

convert -density 300 tmp2.pdf +level-colors blue,white output.pdf