97

I am using the “Preview” application for reading a PDF file on a MacBook Pro. Is there any way in I can read it in dark mode?

You can do it in Adobe Acrobat Reader by changing background and text color, but can “Preview” do that too?

Anwar Shaikh
  • 1,071

8 Answers8

112

I had the same problem so I wrote simple and free app for Mac to read PDFs in negative. App offers two negative modes (colour inversion and colour inversion with sepia).

It is called Negative and it is free on the Mac App Store

grg
  • 201,078
Krystian Kozerawski
  • 1,221
  • Very nice! I'm not sure how PDFs are encoded, but it would be great if you would skip the color inversion for photos. – Matthew Oct 13 '18 at 15:46
  • 3
    And also a dark mode toolbar :) – Matthew Oct 13 '18 at 15:47
  • 1
    Thanks so muchi, been looking for something like that for ages. I would happily pay for Negative too, to sustain development ;-)

    @Matthew you can toggle dark mode via the View menu, although support for macOS native dark mode would be appreciated.

     – cseelus Dec 13 '18 at 22:10
  • Wow, that was nice, awesome work :) – CopsOnRoad Nov 24 '19 at 18:19
  • Thank you guys!. The app is very simple in fact. I just apply the CIFilter on a layer of PDFView. It works on Mac, but doesn't on iOS and iPadOS. For more sophisticated color inversion (bypassing the images for example), the PDF file itself should be decomposed, and that is quite a huge work. In September or October I will probably release new version of Negative for Mac with updated user interface for macOS Big Sur (the app is already rewritten using SwiftUI). I am also thinking about developing Negative 2 with PDF decomposing and reversing only the background nad text color. – Krystian Kozerawski Jul 12 '20 at 07:02
  • So I am now looking for good sources of info about how to decompose PDFs to a form of JSON or XML, or something that could be parsed into new PDF with dark mode. – Krystian Kozerawski Jul 12 '20 at 07:04
  • 1
    The Toggle Toolbar Colours setting is not retained upon restart. – TT-- Jul 15 '20 at 13:52
  • It's great, but no highlighter makes it a deal breaker for me.. – Janac Meena Dec 16 '20 at 21:45
  • Congrats @KrystianKozerawski, and thank you! Negative is awesome, and I even tried PDF Expert. It really is simple, but works as a charm! I liked specially the dark mode, which retained the syntax highlighting of the books, unlike the "Expert" one, which made them all grey... Thank you. – rsalmei Feb 08 '21 at 02:25
  • 1
    @KrystianKozerawski Are older versions available that are compatible with macOS 10.15? Thank you very much. – isend May 19 '22 at 05:40
  • 2
    @isend yep. Here is the link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pg3gz9yxeepn2xz/Negative.zip?dl=0 – Krystian Kozerawski May 20 '22 at 06:04
  • The app is great; I have installed it on my Mac. However, I can't find a way to jump to a certain page. It would be great if this feature is supported. Is this project open source, can we contribute? – sareno Aug 25 '22 at 12:51
  • Dark mode in Negative is so blur and difficult to read, is it a normal behavior of it? and it does not open multiple files as tabs :-( – alper Oct 01 '22 at 20:45
  • Might you consider putting this up on GitHub? Double-clicking files to open them in Negative fails. Also the white text on the dark background is too white! And the white background in normal mode is too white. Also it doesn't remember its presets. – P i Oct 22 '23 at 11:56
  • I can see one way to improve it, enable page view on top of scroll view – Jeffery Tang Nov 13 '23 at 02:09
51

While there is not an inverted color scheme for Preview, you can invert the screen colors for the entire system by pressing

Command-Option-Control-8

Press the sequence again to restore the default color scheme.

enable inverted colors accessibility option shortcut

Amr Lotfy
  • 103
Daniel
  • 34,803
  • 13
    If that key combo does not work, check that it's enabled under System preferences / Keyboard / Shortcuts / Accessibility. Also, Command-Option-F5 could be used (if that shortcut is enabled) to bring up the accessibility options control menu, and invert the display through that. – AndOs Aug 10 '19 at 22:13
  • 1
    The easiest solution and doesn't need to download anything. Works like a charm – MyNick Dec 20 '21 at 19:24
  • In addition to being simple, quick and reversible this solution doesn't change your document or sacrifice any features, such as highlighting. Good workaround until Apple updates Preview – Tony M Mar 28 '23 at 05:31
  • The keyboard shortcut setting doesn't exist in modern versions of the OS unfortunately afaict – geoidesic Feb 13 '24 at 18:31
19

I use Adobe Acrobat Reader to read PDF books. In Preferences > Accessibility > Document Colors Options I set "Replace Document Colors" and "Custom Color". Page Background: black and Document Text: a ordinary dark grey.

So my default PDF reader is Preview with regular color, but I open PDF books with customized Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Elhem Enohpi
  • 463
edsonpatricio
  • 191
12

PDF Expert (Free | $80)

enter image description here

This is by far the best solution I've come across for reading PDF files in dark mode. It has a sepia mode as well, which is a nice plus. It works on images by making them grayscale and then inverting them.

  • I tried Negative, and it was horrible in terms of performance. PDF Expert is so smooth, it feels like a native macOS app.
  • I also have Acrobat, but using it for night mode feels kind of "hacky." Its performance is not great, and its price is quite hefty. PDF Expert on the there hand has a dedicated night mode, which works and looks better than Acrobat's night mode. PDF Expert has a hefty price, but you get the night mode with the free version.
  • Using the invert mode on macOS disables Night Shift and True Tone. Those are the last things that I want to disable at nighttime (which is usually when I want to read PDFs in dark mode). It also inverts color images, which looks pretty bad in my opinion. PDF Expert does it much better.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Readdle or PDF Expert. I just think it works much better than any of the other options mentioned here.

Oion Akif
  • 8,892
  • 2
    You're right, night mode works really well with PDF Expert, thanks for the suggestion. – Gabriel Romon Jul 22 '20 at 06:31
  • My pleasure, Mr. Silva! – Oion Akif Feb 13 '21 at 06:49
  • It's extremely rare that I see a post on Stack Exchange mentioning a paid product, and I don't immediately down-vote it. But. Yeah, wow. PDF Expert is exactly what I wanted here. Thanks! – ELLIOTTCABLE Apr 21 '22 at 05:27
  • I will admit that it's significantly more expensive than I'd like it to be. Seems like they switched to a subscription model with a lifetime option for $140, which seems quite high to me – Oion Akif Apr 23 '22 at 04:19
  • In dark mode pdf-expert does not show in colors – alper Oct 01 '22 at 20:42
  • You're right, unfortunately it doesn't. I believe it mainly has to do with the fact that certain colors would have lessened contrast if they are not themselves inverted, which leads to a whole new can of worms as to which colors should be substituted by what. So far, I have not come across a PDF viewer which does dark mode any other way – Oion Akif Oct 12 '22 at 05:47
  • Skim (https://skim-app.sourceforge.io) does it – alper Oct 25 '22 at 11:40
  • I have been using Skim and indeed prefer it, as it makes the background gray instead of completely black – Oion Akif Oct 30 '22 at 05:47
9

There is not a dark mode for preview.

You can use the flux software to at least bring the color warmth up and brightness down. It makes the whole OS easier on the eyes at night.

In another hand, there is iBooks which, I think, have a dark mode.

Chris
  • 641
6

I'm a bit late to the answers here, but if someone is still looking for an answer here I've found somewhat reasonable solution(s) to this problem. I've tried the other solutions mentioned, but none of them worked well enough for me.

1st Solution : (General Solution across platforms)

Install the extension Midnight Lizard on chrome based browsers and then give it the privileges to local files. This extension is primarily for changing the color(s) on an html page.

However, since many browsers today support opening pdf documents, this extension works really well. There are different color schemes you can use to change the colors in the pdf document and you have a lot of customizations. However, a downside to it, is that the page scrolling/ zooming is really slow.

Note : Although this extension is available also on firefox, this ability to invert colors on local files is currently (as of writing of this answer) is only restricted to chrome.


2nd Solution : (Mac based solution)

Create a dark version of your pdf to view with preview. You can use imagemagick to invert the colors in your pdf document.

  1. Open Terminal
  2. If not already installed with Homebrew, run brew install imagemagick
  3. Change to the directory of the files
  4. Execute the following command:

convert -density 150 -channel RGB -negate "source-file.pdf" "output-file.pdf"

The density is your dpi, so you can adjust it according to your need.

This method saves you invert colors for the whole OS, which is just absurd. However, it does have a small disadvantage. During this conversion, the pdf pages are converted to images or scans. Thus, you lose the ability to copy/ select text. If you want to annotate your text, you can annotate with a line tool instead of a marker.

tech189
  • 105
Anmol
  • 161
4

You can try zathura. The documentation gives the MacPorts port as the method of installation for macOS, but this Homebrew tap actually works for Big Sur. Once you've followed the installation steps:

  1. Open the pdf with zathura, by typing zathura in the terminal.
  2. A window should appear, in it press o for "open" and then enter the /full/path/to/file.pdf.
  3. Then you can hit control + r to revert the color.
tech189
  • 105
sinestandly
  • 41
  • 2
  • 1
    This worked the best for me, you have to install 3 brews (mupdf and native macos integration) and then use the dark mode config from https://github.com/triumphantomato/zathura-dark-mode (way smoother than inverting colors). – Tobias Cudnik Nov 23 '21 at 07:07
3

You can use the system preferences sections: Accessibility to invert your display colours. That's not focussed on preview, but does the trick.

Ekkstein
  • 131