Printer Friendly PDFs

[bee2]

I hate to complain about such a great free resource like DAREBEE.

I do have a suggestion. To save ink, I would suggest a PDF without a gradient background. Perhaps a PDF with no background.

I understand there is a large catalog of existing PDFs. Perhaps new PDFs could be created this way?

Thank you for these great tools.

 

[dontmindlosing]

I had the same thought several years ago, and I believe that someone had brought this up in the old forum. If I remember correctly, one reason Darebee keeps the gradient background is there have been problems with people using Darebee's copyrighted images for their own derivative works. Keeping the gradient makes it a bit more difficult to reuse images and workouts in ways that contravene Darebee's Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives International License. An unfortunate consequence of this is the extra ink, you're right.

 

[lofivelcro]

In the old Hive there was a thread where someone figured out a way to make the PDFs printer friendly in paint.net, a free image manipulating software. It works pretty well and I have done it a few times myself, despite being completely untalented with this kind of software.
Here's the instructions, saved from the old Hive when it was announced to be closed:

Printer-friendly Darebee Workouts Step-by-Step

1) Copy or export the image from the PDF file
2) Open the image in paint.net
3) Duplicate the image layer
4) Doubleclick the top layer and set the blend mode to "screen"
5) Still on the top layer, use "Effects > Noise > Median" with the values "Radius:1, Percentile:0"
6) Use "Adjustments > TwoToneThreshold" with values about "Lo:70, Hi:200". Make sure your primary and secondary colors are set to black/white (standard).
7) Check the corners with the Color Picker (K) to see if they're true white (255/255/255). If not, undo the TwoToneThreshold and redo it with a lower "Hi Threshold" value.
8) Flatten the image (Ctrl+Shift+F)and save as PNG
9) Go to the following website: https://waifu2x.booru.pics/ and upload the PNG, run it with standard settings (Medium Noise Reduction, 2x Scale)
10) Open the PNG of the resulting image (at the top under "Full Image") and save
11) Open the enlarged PNG in pain.net again
12) Use the Lasso Select tool to select only the red parts (title and logo, doesn't have to be precise, white parts don't matter)
13) Use "Effects > Blurs > Surface Blur" with values about "Radius:10, Threshold:25"
14) Save and done!

Edit: I think it was also done to print the PDFs in a larger format, I don't know exactly how large any more, but I suppose it doesn't matter if the resulting image is larger than the paper you want to print it on.

Edit edit: I hope it's okay to post it here, it had been available and was mentioned several times in other threads on the old Hive, so I figure the chief Bees didn't mind, as long as it was for private use only.