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I have a document that has images that are very, very dark. As such, they should not be printed when the user goes to print. Somebody I'm working with loves to print, and they use a lot of toner this way.

Is there a way to make an image not print in the hard copy paper view, but show up in the electronic view?

yo'
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bobobobo
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  • I think this is a little off-topic since it's a PDF specification related issue but I've learned quite a while ago that anything is possible in here. – percusse Aug 26 '12 at 19:05
  • @percusse I believe it's on-topic because I'm pretty sure it is possible with PDF and the true problem is: How to do it in LaTeX. – yo' Aug 26 '12 at 19:09
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    You should search for Optional Content Groups (OCG) and setting the PrintState and ViewState. The hyperref package can do this for link colors, maybe have a look there. – Juri Robl Aug 26 '12 at 19:20
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    Well, you can build two pdfs, one with the option draft, one without. Option draft forces to hold only the place of the image. – Mensch Aug 26 '12 at 20:31
  • Another solution would be to increase the gamma by a factor of 20 or 100 (so that the images are significantly washed out) in print. I wonder if this is also possible. – bobobobo Aug 26 '12 at 20:35
  • @JuriRobl I believe that this is the correct way of thinking! I completely forgot that hyperlink already uses this feature. – yo' Aug 26 '12 at 21:01
  • @bobobobo: With pngs it may be possible with pdftex. – Martin Schröder Aug 26 '12 at 21:36
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    Have you considered that your print loving co-worker may end up firing of a gazillion copies of the document while trying to figure out why his images won't print? Whatever the answer to your question ends up being, I'm going to use it for entertainment purposes ;) – Scott H. Aug 26 '12 at 21:43
  • see also http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122793/create-element-in-pdf-that-doesnt-print-to-paper – knut Nov 13 '13 at 13:30

1 Answers1

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If you are using pdflatex or lualatex, pdftex.def allows you to specify an alternate image to be used for printing:

\includegraphics[print=print.png]{screen.pdf}

This will probably only work with Adobe Reader.

Martin Schröder
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  • While this sounds like a really great idea, I tried it pdflatex=>pdf file=>Adobe Reader=>Print XPS file, but the xps file still had the {screen.pdf} image – bobobobo Aug 28 '12 at 17:53