I built a small tool to make PDFs easier to read at night

Issah Yoder — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:23:25 +0000

I read a lot of PDFs at night, especially on my phone.

And honestly, PDFs are not great for that.

Most of them still feel like digital paper: white background, fixed layout, and tiny text. Dark mode helps a bit, but many tools only change the page color.

The bigger problem for me was mobile reading.

When the text is too small, I have to pinch zoom, move the page left and right, zoom out again, then repeat the same thing on the next paragraph.

After doing that too many times, I thought:

Why can’t I just read the PDF text like an article?

So I built a small free tool:

PDF Dark Mode

It has two reading modes.

Page color mode

This keeps the original PDF layout, but makes the page darker and easier to read at night.

I use this for scanned PDFs, tables, image-heavy documents, or files where the original layout matters.

Text reading mode

For selectable PDFs, the tool can extract the text and show it in a cleaner reading view.

You can adjust the font size, line height, font family, and theme.

This is the part I personally wanted most, because it makes mobile reading much more comfortable. Instead of constantly pinch-zooming a fixed PDF page, the PDF starts to feel more like a normal article.

Privacy

The tool runs locally in the browser.

Your PDF is not uploaded to a server, and refreshing the page clears the current session.

Try it

You can try it here:

PDF Dark Mode

I built it for my own night reading, but I’d love to hear feedback from anyone who reads PDFs on mobile.

Also, if you ever need to convert a dark PDF back to a light version, I made a related tool for that too:

PDF Light Mode

DEV Community: Issah Yoder

I built a small tool to make PDFs easier to read at night

Page color mode

Text reading mode

Privacy

Try it