Is there any pdf viewer with dark mode?

Question

Basically, I want a viewer which has a night mode or a dark mode so that I can change a pdf with a white background and black text to a dark background and light coloured text.

Answer 1

This method is only for text only documents. Otherwise the image colors will be inverted.

You can install Evince document viewer from this link and open it.Then goto the options on the top right corner as seen in the picture.

Then select Inverted colors. This will help you to read white text on a black background. In Evince document viewer 3.30.1+ select Night Mode.

Answer 2

Simply inverting colors doesn't provide the best readability (being limited to very bright white text on very dark black background), although it can improve it a lot in a dark environment.

Evince and also pdfstudioviewer can do that, which will result in something like this (in both image and text pdfs):

PDF readers that can change both page and text color in both text and image (scanned text) pdf files are:

• Okular (in newer versions, like 1.9.3). See below.

• Master PDF Editor More details in this answer, also

• Zathura - as described in this answer.

I think this is more readable:

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UPDATE on Okular:

In newer versions of Okular (like 1.9.3) both font and page colors can be edited — and a dark-mode look can be enabled — through a new and rather non-intuitive setting, under Configure Okular - Accessibility - Color mode: Change Dark and Light Colors, by selecting a light color for dark and a dark one for light color option.

Then, for easy access, configure toolbar and add Toggle change color. It works for picture/scanned pages too.

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qpdf can change both text and background color but only in text-based pdf files - and that in a rather odd manner: only background/"paper" color can be set directly, the font color can only be "inverted" from white to black: so, the trick is to set the direct color in such a way as to result in a desired color when inverted (see this answer, which provides an example of good setting for a proper dark mode result: Background color: #41403b, Paper color: #cccbca).

Just for text-based pdfs, Adobe Reader 9 can separately set both font and page colors (when it can still be used in Linux: more here).

See my linked answer on Foxit Reader, which can match the two above but has no dark GUI and no full-screen.

Calibre Ebook Reader (like many ebook readers) can edit colors of font and page, but it can also open text-based pdfs.

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By the way: in case somebody needs to transform a scanned text saved as image-pdf so that it becomes more readable by removing colored (gray, yellowish or pinkish) background, a good tool is ScanTailor, as described here.

Answer 3

Atril from MATE DE also has Inverted Colors mode (accessible with Ctrl+I):

You can install Atril with sudo apt-get install atril.

Answer 4

I recommend you to go for Okular, one of the best readers for Linux platform. It is free of cost and provides features such as

1. Night view mode
2. Annotate and Markup tools
3. Text extraction from PDF file
4. Border trimming, and lot more.

Answer 5

I found all these answer are usefull then finally found this

xcalib -i -a

This inverts all the screen , everywhere. So no need to find if a particular software have this feature or not. I can set a hotkey and now whenever I want dark mode I just need to press the Hotkey, works even for browser.

Installation

sudo apt-get install xcalib

Answer 6

how about Foxit Reader? ( a big name on Windows - although the Linux version seems like minimal version )

It allows us to view a PDF in many better ways than Inverted Colors so you can choose what is suit for you ( and your eyes)

thanks @bodqhrohro for the image

For Night:

Black:

Darkmode:

For Day:

Yellow :

Pink:

Blue:

Get it officially here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/pdf-reader/

Answer 7

After testing through many pdf readers, I found qpdfview is the best application for viewing pdf in dark mode.

Foxit is the best in term of dark mode colors configuration, but it can't view djvu, there's no dark theme for the UI.

Here is my qpdfview's setup for dark mode, it should work for scanned pdf/djvu, and vector pdf.

View > Invert Colors
View > Composition > Darken with paper color

<Invert colors> option ensures that scanned documents and images (which almost are in light colors) are in dark mode. When using <Invert colors> option, the paper color and background color should be light colors, such as:

Settings > Graphics
Background color: #41403b
Paper color: #cccbca

Here is the result:

Vector pdf, with colored texts 1

Scanned djvu 2

Answer 8

Sioyek is a newcomer on the scene, but has quickly become my favorite PDF reader.

It has both a dark mode and a custom colors mode. Mine look like this:

Dark

Custom

Normal

But that's just my setup. You can make it whatever you want.

To set custom colors, create the file $HOME/.config/sioyek/prefs_user.config and include a section such as:

custom_background_color 0.075 0.082 0.094
custom_text_color 0.529 0.686 0.875

Where the numbers correspond to r g b values between 0 and 1. E.g., 1 1 1 would be white and 0 0 0 would be black, 1 0 0 would be red, etc.

Answer 9

If you're using Compiz WM with "Color filter" plugin installed, you can enable any of several nightmode filters for any windows.

Answer 10

i was searching for X software too and i could not find one my bad solution...using vim with a plugin ( Plug 'makerj/vim-pdf') let you do it just make sure your terminal is readable and you book as no real image and your set here a link to the "plugin" https://github.com/makerj/vim-pdf

Answer 11

WPS Office 11

WPS Office since v11 has a PDF viewer with Dark mode that works quite well (i.e. not just simple colour inverting). It also has Sepia and Eye Protection mode.

You can install it from:

• flatpak (I recommend this option)
• snap