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7 hours ago
2
Hallelujah! Apple seems to have finally addressed a long-standing peeve of mine with macOS Tahoe, iOS and iPadOS 26 Developer Beta — a proper dark mode toggle for PDF reading in the Preview app.
On macOS, this is under the View menu as an option called Use Dark Appearance for PDF. On iOS and iPadOS, it’s under the meatballs (3-dots) overflow menu and more pleasantly named as Dark Background. I’ve added some screenshots below from my devices.
Dark mode in Preview app on macOS Tahoe
Dark mode in Preview app on iPadOS 26
It seems thoughtfully implemented — text, graphics etc. are inverted while images are not, which is better than a lazy full page invert. Code blocks with syntax highlighting on my programming books also get correctly inverted and looks pleasing and accessible to me.
Currently on macOS Tahoe, there’s no default shortcut for dark mode toggle but we can add one by going into System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard shortcuts > App Shortcuts (on left sidebar), clicking the + button to add a new shortcut. Here, I selected Preview for Application, Use Dark Appearance for PDF as the menu title and pressed my desired shortcut (I went with Option + Shift + A). Click Done to add the shortcut. Now jump back to Preview app and try the added shortcut, it should toggle dark mode. In case that’s not happening, make sure you spelled the menu title correctly and followed the same capitalization as this setting is case-sensitive.
I’ve been using PDF Viewer from PSPDFKit — which is free for viewing PDFs — for a long time as my primary PDF reader on all my Apple devices because it has a Dark mode. Yes, I know but I refuse to use Adobe. With this latest addition, I think I can have one less app across all my devices.
