Students printing lecture notes, offices printing reports for a meeting, anyone printing at a cyber cafe or print shop where every page is charged: printing PDFs costs more than it needs to, mostly because documents are printed exactly as they were designed for the screen. A 60-slide lecture deck becomes 60 sheets of paper. A brochure with a coloured header is charged at the colour rate. A scan with a wide black border uses as much toner on the border as on the text.
Fixing this takes a couple of minutes before you print. Here is what makes the biggest difference, roughly in order of how much it saves.
Put several pages on each sheet
This is the single largest saving. Presentation slides are designed to be read from across a room, so their text is large and survives a lot of shrinking. Six slides per sheet is readable for almost any deck; four per sheet if the slides are dense with small text. Printing double-sided at six per sheet turns 60 slides into five sheets of paper.
For ordinary documents with body text, two pages per sheet is the practical limit. Each page is printed at about 70% of its size, which is close to the size of a paperback book: comfortable for reading, and it halves the paper.
Most printer dialogs have a "pages per sheet" option, but phone printing, many print-shop kiosks and some printers do not. Building the layout into the PDF with Pages per sheet works everywhere, and you can check the result before paying for it. Print the arranged file at Actual size or 100%, so the printer does not shrink it a second time.
Print in greyscale on purpose
Colour printing is typically several times the price of black and white, and many printers and print shops charge the colour rate for a page that contains any colour at all, even one small logo. Choosing "black and white" in the print dialog does not always help: some printers still mix colour inks to make a richer grey.
Converting the PDF itself to greyscale with Greyscale PDF removes the doubt. It also shows you how the document will look before you print it, which matters more than people expect. Charts that use red and green lines of similar brightness become two identical grey lines. Highlighted text can disappear. If a chart depends on colour, convert every page except that one.
Trim the margins and the borders
Scanned pages often have a black or grey border where the scanner lid did not cover the edge. On a laser printer that border is solid toner, page after page. Slides exported to PDF frequently have a broad white frame, which means the content prints smaller than it could.
Crop PDF removes both. Its auto-crop option finds the printed area of each page separately, which suits a pile of scans of different sizes. Crop before arranging pages per sheet: with the empty margins gone, each page is printed larger in its slot.
Make every page fit the paper
Documents assembled from different sources mix page sizes: a US Letter attachment inside an A4 report, or a phone photo of a receipt at an unusual size. When the paper in the tray is A4, printers handle a mismatched page in one of three ways, all bad: they cut off the edge, shrink the page to a postage stamp, or stop and ask for different paper.
Making every page A4 before printing, with Resize pages, avoids all three. Pages are scaled to fit and centred, never stretched.
The print dialog settings that matter
- Double-sided (duplex). Halves the paper on its own. For portrait pages flip on the long edge; for landscape sheets, such as two pages per sheet, flip on the short edge or the backs come out upside down.
- Page range. Print only the pages you need. A 40-page report often has a cover, a contents page and appendices that nobody in the meeting will read.
- Draft or toner-save mode. Fine for notes you will read once. Not for anything you hand to someone else.
- Scale. "Fit to page" is right for an untouched document. After arranging pages per sheet, use 100%.
A quick order of work
- Remove pages you do not need.
- Crop away borders and wide margins.
- Resize everything to the paper you have, usually A4.
- Convert to greyscale, checking charts and highlights.
- Arrange several pages per sheet.
- Print double-sided, at actual size.
Each step runs in your browser and takes seconds, and the result is a file you can take to any print shop on a USB stick or send to a phone, knowing exactly what will come out of the printer.