I just bought some Eurostar tickets online. (For FOSDEM, incidentally; anyone else going?) Like most travel operators, they allow you to download PDF tickets to print at home.

Like most travel operators, they see the extra space on a sheet of A4 paper as an excellent marketing opportunity. Well, I don’t like advertising at the best of times, but wasting my own toner printing adverts on the tickets I’ve just spent £80 to buy? That’s simply intolerable!

Eurostar ticket with ads

So what do I do? Load it up in PDFedit and draw white rectangles over the ads (because it’s easier than working out how to delete them), re-save the PDFs, then print them out.

I wonder if I’m missing an easier way, though—and I don’t mean learning to accept the consumer world as it is, although that would be easiest of all.

At the very least, it seems that an automated solution should be possible. It would take disproportionately longer to implement it than any time I’d save, but it might be a fun challenge: Adblock for paper tickets.