Changing the text and background color of a PDF file

Question

I\'d like to change the background color and text color programmatically in PDF documents so that they\'re nicer to read at night (kinda like in Adobe Reader: Edit -> Prefer

Answer 1

Just in case the OP doesn't really need to change the PDF document colors permanently, but only wants a PDF viewer other than Acrobat that can do similarly change the displayed colors...

MuPDF: MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer (amongst other things). It can invert the displayed colors with the simple stroke of the i for any document while it is open. MuPDF is also available for Windows (and iOS, and Android, and OSX, and Linux). (It is made by the same company which brought us Ghostscript).

MuPDF screenshots here: "normal" view (left) and "inverted" view (right)

 

SumatraPDF: This is a very popular alternative PDF viewer for Windows. Its PDF rendering engine is based on MuPDF. Hitting . in presentation mode, it changes background to black. Hitting w in presentation mode, it changes background to white. (I don't think it can also invert all colors, but I do not have the latest release available right now to check.) For startup adding -invert-colors to the command line, it will invert the colors for the rendered document.

Zathura: A lightweight PDF viewer for Linux and OSX, which can be controlled by Vim-like keyboard shortcuts. ctrl+r will re-color the rendering of any opened document. Background will change to dark, texts will change to bright gray (however it will not invert a, say blue text to yellow, like MuPDF does). I'm not sure if it is available on Windows too.

Evince: The Gnome PDF viewer, available for Linux, OSX and Windows. It can invert the colors of the open document too; the keyboard shortcut is ctrl+i.

XPDF: XPDF is quite an ancient PDF viewer for Unix + Linux (not sure if there is a Windows version available -- maybe in Cygwin). It has a startup option in its command line: xpdf -rv -papercolor "#333333" file.pdf will invert the colors (-rv is for reverse video, -papercolor lets you change the background to something different from pure black [as any inverted white would become]).