Invert PDF Colours
A dark-mode version of a document. Free, and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, stored or sent to a server.
About Invert PDF Colours
Flips every colour in the document: black text on white becomes white on black, which is the dark-mode version of a PDF that no reader offers and everybody wants at two in the morning.
Inverting is right for text and wrong for pictures. A page of prose comes out exactly as you hoped; a page with a photograph comes out as a photographic negative, because that is what inverting a photograph is. On a document that mixes the two there is no setting that fixes it — the honest answer is that this suits text documents.
Like everything that changes how a PDF looks, it works by rendering the pages and rebuilding them as images. The text stops being text: it cannot be searched, selected or copied afterwards, and the file is usually several times larger. Keep the original.
Where it helps
- The dark mode that PDF readers do not have, on any document.
- Only the pages you name are rendered, which keeps a long document manageable.
- Resolution is yours to choose rather than fixed at whatever the tool thought best.
- The document never leaves your browser.
Limits
- The text becomes an image: nothing can be searched, selected, copied or extracted afterwards.
- Photographs come out as negatives, because that is what inversion does.
- The file is usually several times larger than the original.
- Links, bookmarks and form fields do not survive the rebuild.
- Rendering a long document at high resolution is slow and memory-hungry in a browser tab.
Frequently asked questions
Why can I not select the text any more?
Because there is no text. Changing the colours of a PDF cannot be done to its content — the page is a program of drawing operations, with no "make everything lighter" instruction — so the only way is to render the page and invert the pixels. What comes back is a picture of the page.
Can I keep the images the right way round?
No. The inversion is applied to the whole page, because at the pixel level there is nothing left to distinguish a photograph from a paragraph.
What resolution should I use?
150 dpi for reading on a screen, 200 or more if it will be zoomed, 300 if it will be printed. Each step up roughly doubles the file size.
Is there a way to do this without losing the text?
Not in the file. Several readers — including recent versions of Acrobat and most e-readers — have a night mode that inverts at display time, which leaves the document alone. That is a better answer when it is available.
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