Print Only the Pages You Need

You've got a 50-page PDF of lecture notes. Your exam covers chapters 3, 5, and 7. That's maybe 12 pages scattered across the document. But the print shop doesn't let you pick and choose. You print all 50 or you open the PDF on your laptop, squint at the page numbers, and split it into three separate files before uploading. Either way it's more work and more money than it should be.

This kept coming up. Not just with students. Working professionals printing compliance docs, parents printing specific worksheets for their kids, anyone with a long PDF and a short list of pages they actually need. The workaround was always the same. Print the whole thing, or do the slicing yourself.

We didn't want to keep accepting that.

The syntax everyone already knows

Every computer has a print dialog. You've probably typed "1,3,10-12" into one before. Commas for individual pages, dashes for ranges. It works because everyone already understands it.

So we put the same thing on our site. When you upload a PDF for printing, there's a text field where you type the pages you want, exactly like you would in your computer's own print window. Type "1,3,5-7" and we print five pages. Type nothing and we print the whole document. The price updates as you type, so the maths is always obvious before you order.

Seeing what you're printing

This part matters more than it sounds. When you upload a PDF, we render a thumbnail of every page and show it to you in a grid. Not a filename with a page count. The actual pages, so you can confirm the right document went through and the content looks correct before you spend anything.

When you type a page selection, the thumbnails respond. Pages you're printing stay bright. Pages you're skipping dim out. So if you type "1,3,5-7" you can literally see pages 2 and 4 go grey while 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7 stay visible. There's no guesswork about what you're getting.

The thumbnails also have coloured borders. Orange means that page has colour content. Grey means black and white. We detect this automatically when you upload, and it feeds directly into the price. If your 14-page document has 12 B&W pages and 2 colour pages, you pay for 12 at the B&W rate and 2 at the colour rate. Not 14 at the colour rate because you had to pick one or the other.

Before we added this, a mixed document with 12 B&W pages and 2 colour pages would cost either S$2.10 (all B&W, losing your colour content) or S$4.90 (all colour, overpaying for 12 pages). Now it costs S$2.50. That's the fair price.

The point of all this

We could show you a filename and a page count and a dropdown and call it a day. That's what most online print services do. But when you're about to pay for something, you should be able to see what you're getting. Which pages, which ones are colour, what it costs, all in the same place, all updating as you make changes.

Upload a PDF on our document printing page and try it. B&W starts at S$0.15 per page, colour at S$0.35.