converting a hyperlinked pdf \includepdf to black and white

Question

Most recent scientific articles come with hyperlinks within the document (generally linking citations to the references; e.g. this file). These are often coloured. When including them into a TeX file, the hyperlinks break but the colour denoting the links remain.

Is there a way to include the pdf in black and white?

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{pdfpages}

\begin{document}

\includepdf{file.pdf}

\end{document}

UPDATE: I found a work around for this in the form of "printing" a new PDF in greyscale (Print/advanced/colour - change to Composite Gray). If someone knows of some TeX based method...please do let me know!

Answer 1

There seems to be no way of doing this, as per the pdfpages documentation. However, it does mention how to change the background page color.

The workaround you mentioned is perhaps the easiest way to deal with it: print your document to .pdf (say, with PDFCreator) in gray-scale and then normally \includepdf it.