1. A computer-readable storage medium comprising stored instructions that are executable and, responsive to execution of the instructions by a computing device, the computing device performs operations to: receive an indication that a printout of a word processing document from a printer has been requested, the word processing document having content with a format that would result in a first quantity of pages being printed; segment the content into one or more regions according to a set of grouping rules, the set of grouping rules defining a region having at least one homogeneous characteristic; filter one or more potential transformations for each region to generate one or more filtered transformations based on a set of rules that restricts a transformation according to a region type, the region type being determined by the at least one homogeneous characteristic for each region; evaluate a cost function for each of the one or more filtered transformations to determine an appearance effect on one or more appearance attributes for the word processing document; reject one or more of the filtered transformations to the word processing document that will result in a loss of information including at least one of unreadable text or an image obscured by text; and apply one or more of the filtered transformations that are not rejected to the content individually for each region to print the word processing document with the content in a transformed format that results in a second quantity of pages being printed without falling below a predetermined readability threshold, the second quantity of pages being less than the first quantity of pages.
9. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the computing device performs the operations further comprising to estimate an optimum number of the second quantity of pages prior to the application of the one or more filtered transformations.