How to print in Black and White for Canon Printers

I am using a Canon MP280 printer, which I found a driver from canon on the european site for. The print dialogue does not allow me to print in black and white unfortunately. Does anyone know of a way for me to force this? I'm guessing it is just a fault with my printer driver, but I feel like greyscale printing should be something in the OS sending the job, not in the printer drivers part.

As outlined in this blogpost. I tested this on Canon MP280 using Ubuntu 12.04.

1. Click System –> Administration –> Printing.

2. Now right click on your printer and select Properties.

3. Now select Job Options

4. Now scroll down to the bottom.

5. At the bottom you will see a text box . In that text box add CNGrayscale and click on Add button .

6. Once you click add there will appear another text box right above the first text box . So in the second text box add "TRUE” and click on apply.

Thats all , now your printer will print in Grayscale mode . In case you want to print in color mode just change the TRUE to FALSE .

EDIT, In the 12.04.1 precise, these options are difficult to find.

You have to run the application "system-config-printer" in terminal or Alt-F2. Then you will always print in grayscale. No options are available in the menu. I am using mp280series_3.4-1. To print in colour you will have to run system-config-printer again.

If you print to PDF first, you might have the option in there. If you don't (I don't for some reason), you can use imagemagick to convert a PDF from colour to greyscale in one command:

convert -density 600 -colorspace gray output.pdf output_greyscale.pdf

The -density 600 value is just there to preserve some quality as it rasterises text.