PDF to Grayscale
Convert PDF pages to grayscale images in a PDF, keeping their displayed physical page size.
This makes an image-based PDF. Selectable text, links, interactive forms, bookmarks and vector semantics are not retained by the rasterization workflow.
Pages are rasterized as JPEG images. Searchable text, links, forms, bookmarks, digital signatures and other PDF semantics are not preserved. Output may be larger than the original. Keep your original file.
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Grayscale through rendered page images
A raster conversion, not a semantic color edit
PDF.js renders each visible page to a canvas at 1.5 times its displayed physical scale. The handler converts RGB pixels to gray and encodes them as JPEG at quality 0.9, then embeds one JPEG on each new PDF page.
Output pages use the displayed physical width and height, including source crop and rotation effects. They are new image pages, not the original text, vector and annotation objects with different colors. JPEG encoding and rendering can change detail.
What you give up
Searchable/selectable text, links, editable forms, bookmarks and vector semantics can be lost. Accessibility and searchability may degrade. Signatures are not preserved by creating these new raster pages, and the tool does not add OCR or reconstruct accessible text.
The PDF can grow because whole-page images replace compact text/vector content. Synthetic Node checks observed the expected absence of extracted text and interactive structures, and checked displayed page sizes. Those observations do not prove pixel-perfect fidelity or browser compatibility.
When to use a different workflow
Keep the original if you need selectable text, working links or form fields. For a visual-only copy, inspect fine text, charts and cropped pages before sharing. Do not use Grayscale as secure redaction or assume it makes a document uneditable.
Pixels are processed locally, but the PDF.js worker is fetched from jsDelivr. A worker-loading failure, password requirement, canvas limit or insufficient memory can stop conversion. No grayscale processing-server upload is used.