Change PDF Text Color

When changing text color helps

Faint grey text is hard to read on screen and prints poorly. Scanned pages can come out washed out, and some documents use a text color that clashes with a brand guide or a presentation theme. Changing the text color fixes contrast without retyping anything.

How the recoloring works

Each page is rendered, and every pixel darker than the threshold you set (or lighter, in light mode) is recolored to your chosen color. Because it works on what is visible on the page, it recolors text in scanned PDFs as well as digital ones, where editing the text itself would be impossible.

The same rule applies to everything on the page, so dark areas inside photos or diagrams that fall under the threshold change color too. Adjust the threshold and check the side-by-side preview before exporting.

What to know about the exported file

• The new color is applied to every page of the document.
• Pages are re-rendered as images, so text in the exported copy can no longer be selected, copied, or searched.
• Keep your original: to go back, run the tool on the original rather than on the recolored copy.
• To recolor only some pages, extract them, recolor them, and merge them back.

Private processing

Recoloring runs locally in your browser; the PDF is not uploaded to a server. Large documents can take a little while on older devices, since every page is rendered on your machine.

Related tools

For comfortable night reading, Invert PDF Colors produces a dark-mode copy in one step. To change the page color instead of the text, use PDF Background Color.