B/W - How do you convert something to black/white?

[b***@adobeforums.com]

I am trying to convert a document to black and white colorscale for a newspaper ad, can anyone tell me if theres an easy way to do this? I am running Illustrator cs2

[Teri Pettit]

If the document contains only solid colors (no gradients and no patterns), and no brushes or symbols, then you can do it with the Filter>Colors>Convert to Grayscale command.

If it contains any of those kinds of indirect color usage, there are more complicated techniques that rely on the transparency engine to treat the art as an alpha channel onto black.

What color mode is the document starting as, CMYK or RGB? Does it use any spot colors?