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?
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Sign up to join this communityI 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?
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
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.
I use Adobe PDF 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 Reader.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Create a dark version of your pdf to view with preview. You can use imagemagick to invert the colors in your pdf document.
brew install imagemagick
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.
You can use the system preferences sections: Accessibility to invert your display colours. That's not focussed on preview, but does the trick.
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:
zathura
in the terminal./full/path/to/file.pdf
.