If you were to simply to use Reader from the command line, there are a number of options (just search them up here) that you can use to print. Within Reader itself, you can select "Print Color as Black" in the print dialog - and in most versions that setting will stick.
So, just manually open up one PDF in Reader and print it with that option set, then let your program just print all the PDF files to new ones that have all colors as black. If the PDF's are password protected they won't let you print them again, but then nothing else will let you edit them either.
Probably not perfect, but it would certainly be cheap.
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by: khkremerPosted on 2007-06-08 at 09:50:57ID: 19243624
Define 'using vb'... You can of course write a PDF parser in VB that can change the color space of every object, but that's something that would really push the limits of what you should do with VB...
I would use Acrobat and Enfocus PitStop Professional (which is an Acrobat plug-in - http://www.enfocus.com/) and then create a PitStop action to modify the color space for every object.
Do you want to do this for just one document, or is this something that you have to do with multiple documents/as an ongoing activity?
If it's just one document, and if you do have Acrobat (the full version), you can download a 30 day eval license for Pitstop and do this one change.
If you need to do this from within a VB program, it gets more complicated: You need a PDF library or a framework that supports VB and gives you access to the contents of a PDF document.