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Show HN: pdfdark.com – view pdf's in "dark mode" all on client (pdfdark.com)

22 points by iamdan ↗ HN
I wanted a way to read PDFs at night and not burn my retinas out so I whipped together this super simple website with Claude to solve my problem.

It uses Mozilla's pdf.js library to load and render a PDF and then inverts the colors with CSS. It has basic controls like zoom in, zoom out, reset zoom, previous and next page. There are some keyboard shortcuts that you can find by toggling the "q" key.

12 comments

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KTibow
It's unfortunate that this isn't a default option. The only viewer I've seen that happens to be able to do this is Gnome's Document Viewer.
salutis
Also PDF Tools for Emacs, where PDF can match your theme.
johnisgood
You can invert colors in MuPDF, and someone added a way to save your settings (incl. width and height, position of window, inverted color, zoom) and whatnot upon quitting. This person added a search history too (per PDF). I forgot who though, which might make my comment not-so-helpful.

If interested, I am willing to look for it, might be someone I follow.

drops
For those who read on mobile and are too lazy to convert all they have, a quick access shortcut to the 'inverted colors' display mode helps.
matznerd
A better question is how do we not have a dark mode/system settings for HN?