How to print lecture slides without wasting 60 pages

By Nasir Uddin Shamim · Founder, PrintxPDF

Updated 2026-08-02 · 7 min read

A sixty-slide deck printed straight from the lecturer’s PDF is sixty sheets, most of them nine-tenths empty, and if the deck used animations it can easily be a hundred and eighty. Two settings fix almost all of it, and neither takes longer than the walk to the printer.

First: why the page count is wrong

When a lecturer exports slides with animations to PDF, most tools write one page per build step. A slide that reveals four bullet points becomes four near-identical pages. This is where "sixty slides" turns into a hundred and eighty, and no handout setting will fix it, because as far as your printer is concerned those really are different pages.

• If the lecturer posted the original .pptx or .key file on Moodle or Canvas, use that instead. PowerPoint prints the final state of each slide and never duplicates.
• In Keynote, untick Print each stage of builds in the print sidebar and the duplicates vanish.
• If a LaTeX Beamer deck is yours to rebuild, \documentclass[handout]{beamer} collapses every overlay into one frame.
• If a PDF is all you have, delete the duplicate pages once and keep the cleaned file.

Strip the duplicate build-step pages out of a slide PDF before you print or file it.

Then choose the right handout layout

A 16:9 slide is 338mm wide at full size. Everything below follows from how much of that width survives on an A4 sheet.

Based on a 16:9 deck printed on A4 portrait with 12mm margins. "24pt" is typical slide body text.

Tip: The 3 slides per page handout is the one people miss. It is the only layout that prints ruled note lines beside each slide, which is exactly what you want in a live lecture. Six per page is for revision, when you already have the notes.

Notice that 4-up and 6-up produce identical slide widths for a 16:9 deck, because both use two columns. Six per sheet is therefore free relative to four: same legibility, a third less paper. There is almost never a reason to choose 4-up.

Where the setting lives

Kill the colour before it kills a cartridge

Modern slide templates are dark: white text on a near-black background. Printed as-is, every sheet is a solid rectangle of toner, the white text is a hole in it, and the paper comes out damp and curled on an inkjet. A single dark deck can visibly move the ink gauge.

1. In PowerPoint, open the Color dropdown in the print pane and choose Pure Black and White. This is not greyscale: it converts fills to white and keeps outlines, so dark slides print as normal documents.
2. In Keynote, tick Black and white in the print sidebar.
3. In Google Slides, open File → Print preview and tick Hide background in the grey toolbar. That is the control that strips the dark fill.
4. If you are stuck with a PDF, choose greyscale in the printer properties and accept a grey page, or ask the lecturer for the source file. There is no reliable invert-for-print in Acrobat Reader.

Watch out: Greyscale is not the same as Pure Black and White. Greyscale renders a black background as black; it only stops the printer mixing colour inks. For dark decks you need the black-and-white conversion, which lives in the slide app, not in the printer driver.

The whole workflow, once

1. Check the page count first Open the file and look at the last page number. If it is far higher than the number of slides the lecturer talked about, you have build-step duplicates.
2. Get the source file if you can Look on Moodle or Canvas for a .pptx or .key alongside the PDF. It solves the duplicates, the dark background and the handout layout in one move.
3. Pick the layout Three per page for a lecture you are about to sit through. Six per page for revision. Outline if you only want the words.
4. Set the colour mode Pure Black and White for dark templates, greyscale for light ones. Do this in the slide app before you reach the printer driver.
5. Turn on duplex Portrait handouts use Flip on long edge. Six per sheet duplexed puts twelve slides on one physical piece of paper.
6. Preview, then print a range Look at the preview. If slides 40 to 60 are the exam-relevant ones, print 40-60 and leave the rest on screen.

When you only want the words

For text-heavy decks, Outline mode is the most underrated setting in PowerPoint: it prints the title and bullet text with no slide frames, no images and no background, turning a sixty-slide deck into three or four pages. If all you have is a PDF, extracting the text gives you the same thing, and it drops straight into your notes.

Pull the text out of a slide PDF when you want the content, not the slides.

Once the handout is printed, the rest is study method rather than printing, see annotating PDFs for studying for what to do with the note lines. For the settings that apply to every document you print, fitting more on a page and saving ink cover the rest.

Frequently asked questions

How do I print 6 slides per page in PowerPoint?

File → Print, open the dropdown that says "Full Page Slides", and choose Handouts → 6 Slides Horizontal. Horizontal reads left to right, vertical reads top to bottom; horizontal matches how the deck was presented.

Why does my slide PDF have three times as many pages as slides?

The deck used animations and the export wrote one page per build step. Get the original .pptx or .key file if you can, or delete the duplicate pages from the PDF. No print setting can merge them back.

How do I print slides with the speaker notes?

Choose Notes Pages in the same print dropdown. It prints one slide per sheet with the notes underneath, so it is expensive: only use it when the lecturer actually wrote substantial notes rather than reminders to themselves.

How do I stop dark slides printing as solid black?

In PowerPoint choose Pure Black and White in the Color dropdown, which converts fills to white while keeping outlines and text. Greyscale will not help: it prints the dark background as grey. Keynote has an equivalent Black and white option.

How many slides per page is still readable?

Six per sheet on A4 keeps 24pt slide text at roughly 6.5pt, which is readable at desk distance. Nine per sheet drops it to about 4pt, which is only good for finding a slide, not for reading it.

Tools

• Delete Pages
• PDF to Text

Keep reading

• How to annotate PDFs for studying
• How to fit more on a printed page without making it unreadable
• How to print journal articles and papers properly