Dark mode PDFs in Goodnotes
Goodnotes will darken a blank notebook page, but an imported PDF arrives exactly as white as it was. Convert it first and it comes in dark, annotations and all.
No account required. Preview free, then £0.99 per document.
Why an imported PDF ignores dark mode
Goodnotes generates its own paper, so it can draw that paper in any colour it likes. An imported PDF is not paper it generated — it is a document with its own colours baked in, placed on the page as-is. Darkening it would mean editing your file, which Goodnotes deliberately does not do. That is why the notebook around it turns dark and the reading you actually imported stays bright.
The request is old and still open
This is the single most-requested thing on the Goodnotes feature board, with well over a thousand votes and no shipped answer. People have been asking since roughly 2013. It is not an oversight so much as a hard problem: doing it properly means understanding which parts of a page are text and which are photographs, which is a different job from drawing notebook paper.
Convert before importing
Run the PDF through here first, then import the dark version. Goodnotes treats it like any other import: you can write on it, highlight it, and export it, and the page is dark from the moment it opens. Nothing about your workflow changes except the brightness of the thing you are reading at midnight.
Highlighting still works
This is the part people worry about. Highlighter strokes are drawn by Goodnotes on top of the page, not blended into the document, so they show up as clearly on a dark page as a light one. Pen colours behave the same. If anything, a light-on-dark page makes a yellow highlight easier to find later.
Textbooks and scanned handouts
Scanned chapters are the common case for students and the one naive inversion handles worst — scanner speckle becomes bright dust across a dark page. Scans are cleaned up before conversion here, and figures inside them keep their real colours rather than being inverted along with the text.
Questions
Does Goodnotes have a dark mode for imported PDFs?
Not for the document itself. Goodnotes can darken its own notebook paper and its interface, but an imported PDF keeps the colours stored inside the file. Converting the file first is the way to get a dark page.
Can I still annotate and highlight the converted file?
Yes. Goodnotes draws annotations on top of the page rather than into the document, so pens and highlighters work exactly as before and stay clearly visible against a dark background.
Will exporting from Goodnotes keep it dark?
Yes. The dark colours are part of the PDF you imported, so anything Goodnotes exports keeps them, along with whatever you wrote on top.
Does it work on a scanned textbook chapter?
Yes. Scanned pages are treated as documents rather than photographs, and scanner dust is removed first so it does not become bright specks. Up to 40 MB and 500 pages per document.