11. A method comprising: receiving 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; segmenting 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; filtering 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; evaluating a cost function for each of the one or more filtered transformations according to one or more appearance attributes for the word processing document, a sum of the cost functions for the one or more filtered transformations representing a total risk of appearance distortion associated with transforming the document; rejecting 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 applying 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.
11. A method comprising: receiving 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; segmenting 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; filtering 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; evaluating a cost function for each of the one or more filtered transformations according to one or more appearance attributes for the word processing document, a sum of the cost functions for the one or more filtered transformations representing a total risk of appearance distortion associated with transforming the document; rejecting 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 applying 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. 14. The method of claim 11 , wherein the at least one homogeneous characteristic is text with an image.