Screen friendly/easy on the eyes background

Question

Do you have suggestions on how to make a PDF file easier to read on a computer screen? By this I mean anything which isn't changing the format and layout, as this has been discussed in other questions I believe.

I'm thinking of keeping the text in black while using a sand-coloured background. What's a good package for that?

Answer 1

Well, for me the combination

\usepackage{xcolor}
\pagecolor{lightgray!40}

works best. Something closer to sand-color can be achieved by \pagecolor{yellow!20}

Another advice: whatever you do, do not use multicolumn layout! It is so frustrating to move the page up and down...

Answer 2

Some pdf viewers allow you to change the page background color. For example, in xpdf, you can use

xpdf --papercolor "#333333" file.pdf

to view the file with light gray background. (I believe you can also set the papercolor using Xresources).

Similarly, for sumatra pdfviewer you can use

 SumatraPdf  -bg-color 0x333333 file.pdf

to view the file with light gray background. I seem to remember that adobe acrobat also has this option, but I cannot check at the moment.

This method will work regardless of the software used to create the pdf. In addition, you can print the pdf without any changes as well!