White background even though it’s making the content appear brighter and easier to read, it’s not very convenient to use under a low light environment and often could result in eye fatigue. To reduce the effect, we may enable the ‘dark mode’ available on mainstream software.
While it’s possible to turn on the dark theme on Adobe Acrobat Reader DC by going to View > Display Theme > Dark Gray, turning a whole PDF document into an eye-friendly view is a different story.
But luckily, you don’t have to manually edit the document to get the dark background.
There is a way to get the white background to become black, and the black text to become white by switching on a hidden feature within the software. To enable the feature, follow the guide below.
1. Open any PDF document with Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.
2. Then go to Edit > Preferences or press Ctrl+K.
3. On the left menu, click on Accessibility and enable Replace Document Colors.
4. Click on Custom Color and determine the Page Background and Document Text. You may go straight with black and white, but I suggest you try dark gray and light gray respectively as they combine smoother. Then hit OK.
5. The background and text color will change in an instant.
And I want to mention it again, you may enable the software’s dark mode by going to View > Display Theme > Dark Gray.
The ‘inverted’ color setting is universal. Meaning any PDF document viewed with the Adobe Acrobat Reader DC installed on your computer will automatically get the background and text color switched.
The change is neither permanent nor altering the state of the document. If you turn off the ‘Replace Document Colors’ feature, everything will back to the way it’s used to. The document will be pretty much left intact.