Can we have direct dark mode support in PDF?

[crlf0710]

Recently, it has been a trend for many software to support the so-called "dark mode". I believe some PDF software has already supported some heuristic-based dark mode pdf viewing, e.g. Turn page background into black and text into white, and some other content tweaking.

Still, I feel it might be beneficial for the whole community to have some standardized means to author and render PDF documents under dark mode, and make as many publicly available PDFs as possible "dark-mode ready".

[petervwyatt]

Interesting idea - and with implications for accessibility of content across the spectrum of visual disabilities.

A somewhat similar idea was presented by BenQ at the PDF Association's recent Symposium on Advancing the PDF Imaging Model.

[stechio]

Standard guidelines for dark mode rendering would be definitely desirable, since current implementations are often based on simple color inversion schemes which are sub-optimal for human vision.

Eg, Evince supports a "Night mode" with hard B&W contrast and image inversion, which has come under scrutiny: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/1501

Here it is a rendering example:

• dark mode:
• normal mode:

[lrosenthol]

@crlf0710 Dark Mode is really just a special case of the ability to provide alternative styling for a PDF.

As @petervwyatt notes, for Accessibility considerations you have users with varying requirements around color blindness, reduced vision, etc. Were we to address this, it would be better to look at the larger picture of 're-styling"