Thanks for the suggestions. Some notes:
  • Text stays text with A-PDF. I would be surprised if it doesn’t, since the advertised use case of the tool is to shrink PDF size. Only – as I wrote – one needs to check an option in order to prevent colored text from being turned into grayscale.
  • There is no grayscale text in my document. Only black and orange.


Concerning Acrobat: Asides from converting images to gray scale, what use cases are there when preparing Xara documents for printing?

I guess Acrobat’s standard version is sufficient. XI Standard can be found for less than a hundred bucks on eBay, for example. The pro versions seem to add features such as multimedia and 3D, which I don’t need.