JupiterSpaceport wrote:
A PDF file. Black text on white background. It's too bright it's blinding to the eyes how do you get a dark mode version of a PDF? I'm using the default app Preview. I already have dark mode enabled.
That’s normal for any print-based documents, like PDF. These documents are designed to be printed onto a white background. PDF in particular has many internal print-based characteristics that can annoy people. But this is also true for other traditional documents like RTF or Word documents. Only made-for-digital documents like text or graphics, or data-based documents like XML, can be easily viewed in dark mode.
This is another one of those areas where Apple is embracing the future and letting old technologies like print wither away. Sadly, PDF is still very popular on the web and there is no way to fix this.
One site says you can "adjust color" in the tools menu.. but that option is not available (greyed)
That is for adjusting colour in a raster image like a JPG or PNG. PDF is designed to be printed so you don’t actually want to be able to adjust the colour in any way.
I also still have websites with their white background showing in Safari. It seems like this is a MAJOR area that was overlooked in Dark mode as well? For example this website itself. All white background with black text... Horrible to use at night. Seems obvious.
VikingOSX did a good job of explaining the technical details. The only thing I can add is that, in terms of difficulty for all the things one has to do in order to publish a web site, support for dark mode is really easy.
I cannot explain why this site does not yet support dark mode. The Apple Support Communities Use Agreement has links to an “About this site” forum where you can complain about this issue, as well as an e-mail address you can use to contact the Apple hosts themselves. I can tell you that others have brought this issue to the direct attention of the hosts on many occasions in the past, sometimes even in person. But those of us who have large amounts of points or high “level” ratings probably aren’t going to leave over an issue like this. Many of us are “old timers” who prefer light mode anyway. I think that normal people like you would have more of an impact. You are the people this site was designed to help, so it should work better with your user interface preferences, especially when it is so easy to do.
PDFs the most common form of text files, and websites the most common form of use on a computer... both appear lacking a dark mode. Is there nobody else noticing this?
To reiterate, PDFs are NOT text files. That’s the whole problem. Unfortunately, for web sites, you will need to contact the designer of each web site directly and ask them to support dark mode.
