Cleaning Up Worksheets

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Very often, printing out a colored pdf in grayscale results in some painfully hard to read (and write) assignnments. However, these are easily solved by writing on purely white paper.

Table of Contents

  1. Thresholding
  2. Manually Editing

Thresholding

Thresholding selectively darkens and lightens pixels depending on how bright they are. This allows you to filter out gray and make a true black and white page.

Here is the thresholding tool: https://threshold.imageonline.co/index.php

Apparently, it cannot take PDFs, so here is a PDF to PNG tool: https://pdf2png.com/

Here is an example of a thresholded file.

If the file is all black, lower the Threshold, and if it's all white, increase the Threshold.

Warning: This technique only works for text documents - it will mess up images.

Luckily, if you can edit the document, it is possible to make the background clear without destroying the images.

Manually Editing

Note

This demonstration is in Google Docs. Using Microsoft word is similar, but is not exactly the same.

Manually editing the file gives you full control of what you want to be edited, but requires a bit more skill.

Highlight the entire table, rightclick, and look for table options (below Distribute columns)

Tip

If your table has multiple colors, the color may automatically be deleted by selecting cells with more than one color

Then, go to cell background color and choose transparent background.

This clears the background color of the selected cells, making them white. This also works on making the cells other colors, which is why manually editing the document give much more control.

This works for all tables.

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