How does PDFMeter tell a color page from a black-and-white one?

Every page is rasterized on your device and measured pixel by pixel. A pixel counts as colored when its red, green and blue values differ by more than a tolerance you choose, and the page is billed as color once enough of its pixels qualify. That catches a single colored logo on an otherwise black-and-white page, which is exactly what print shops charge for.

What is the difference between grayscale and true black-and-white?

True black-and-white pages contain only black marks on white paper — text and line art. Grayscale pages contain continuous tone: photographs, gradients or tinted fills that need gray toner. PDFMeter separates the two by looking for blocks of solid mid-gray, so the gray edges of anti-aliased text do not mistakenly turn a text page into a grayscale one.

Are my documents uploaded anywhere?

No. PDFMeter runs entirely in your browser using local JavaScript. Your PDFs are never uploaded, and the analysis works offline once the page has loaded.

How many PDFs can I analyze at once?

There is no limit built in — drop in a whole folder. Files are processed one at a time and released from memory afterwards, and you can cancel a long run at any point and keep the results measured so far.

What does the DPI warning mean?

PDFMeter reads every placed image and works out its effective resolution: the image's pixel dimensions divided by the physical size it is printed at. Anything below your chosen floor (150 DPI by default) will look soft in print, and anything far above it is just bloating the file.

PDFMeter

Drop in a stack of PDFs and get exactly what you need to bill and print: how many pages are color, grayscale and true black & white, every page size, image resolution problems — and a client billing CSV or PDF at the end.

🔒 Nothing is uploaded 📁 Whole folders at once 🧾 Billing CSV & PDF 🖨️ Built for print shops 💯 Free, no account

Drop your PDFs here or click to choose files — 1 or 500, it doesn't matter You can also

Settings & rate card

Detection

Accuracy How finely each page is rasterized before it is measured. Color sensitivity Use Lenient when color scans of B&W originals are showing up as color. Minimum image DPI Images below this are flagged as too low-resolution to print well. Overkill DPI Images far above this only bloat the file.

Check image resolution (slower on image-heavy files) Detect scanned pages with no text layer

Rate card

Currency Color page Grayscale page B&W page Per-file fee Set-up or handling charge added once per document.

Bill blank pages (at the B&W rate)

Billing report

Your business name Job / client Reference Date

Everything runs on this device — your files never leave it.

Add some PDFs above and hit Analyze — the breakdown, warnings and billing exports appear here.

Color vs grayscale vs true B&W

Color pages cost more to print, so they need counting exactly. PDFMeter measures every pixel of every page and separates real continuous tone from the gray edges of anti-aliased text — so a page of black type is billed as B&W, not grayscale.

Page sizes & orientation

Every page is matched against A0–A6, B4/B5, Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Executive, Statement and ANSI C, with exact millimeters for anything custom. Mixed-size stacks get flagged before they jam the feeder.

Image resolution problems

Each placed image is measured for effective DPI — its pixel count against the size it actually prints at. Anything under your floor is flagged as soft, anything wildly over it is flagged as wasted file size.

A billing document at the end

Set your per-page rates and export a per-file billing CSV, a per-page detail CSV, or a clean PDF summary with your business name, the client, a reference and the rate card printed on it.

Why PDFMeter exists

If you produce PDFs at any real volume — legal bundles, tender packs, artwork proofs, course notes — the number that matters is not "how many files" but "how many pages, of which kind". Print shops charge more for a color click than a mono one, and plenty of people bill their own clients per page. Getting that count by opening each file and scrolling is slow and error-prone; getting it wrong costs money on every job.

PDFMeter does the counting for you across a whole folder at once, and does it on your own machine. There is no upload step, no queue, no per-file pricing and no account, because the whole thing is JavaScript running in your browser — the same engine that powers the rest of FreshPDF.

How the classification actually works

Each page is rendered once onto a white canvas at a resolution you choose, then measured:

Color — a pixel is colored when its strongest and weakest RGB channels differ by more than the tolerance you set. Once enough of the page's pixels qualify, the page is a color page. Even a small logo will trip it, which is what your printer charges for.
Grayscale — the page contains blocks of solid mid-gray: a photo, a gradient, a tinted table fill. Checking whole blocks rather than single pixels is what stops the gray fringes of anti-aliased text from turning every text page into a grayscale one.
True black & white — marks on paper and nothing else. Text, line art, bitonal scans.
Blank — effectively nothing on the page. Usually the back of a duplex scan, and usually something you do not want to bill or print.

The color and tone percentages for every page are shown in the per-page table and written into the detail CSV, so any classification you disagree with can be checked and the sensitivity adjusted.

Ink coverage

Alongside the page type, PDFMeter estimates ink coverage — the average darkness of the page as a percentage. It is a rough proxy rather than a calibrated TAC figure, but it is a useful sanity check: a run averaging 4% coverage and a run averaging 40% will not cost the same in toner, however identical the page counts look.

Privacy

Client documents are exactly the kind of thing that should not be uploaded to a stranger's server to be counted. Nothing here leaves your device: no upload, no analytics on your documents, and the page keeps working with the network switched off.