TeX Colorscheme
Almost all TeX documents are created with black text on a white background.
This is fine for printing, but for reading on a screen, other color schemes may be preferable,
like bright text on a dark background.
The file colorscheme.tex, along with a few tricks and best practices that I invented,
give a way to create documents with different color schemes,
and seamlessly switch between them whenever you want.
(This is useful if you want to support both a dark version for screen reading
and a light version for printing.)
In colorscheme.tex, I first check the value of the macro \colorscheme to determine the color scheme.
Then I set the colors textColor, bgColor, textRed, textBlue, textGreen based on the colorscheme.
I then set the background color to bgColor and text color to textColor.
In your LaTeX document preamble, add the lines \usepackage{xcolor} and \input{colorscheme.tex}.
Add \def\colorscheme{dark} anywhere in your document before \input{colorscheme.tex}
to switch to the dark color scheme.
Currently supported color schemes are dark, light, and sepia.
If you don't define \colorscheme, the light color scheme (black text on white background)
will be used by default.
Instead of adding \def\colorscheme to your document, you can also specify it over the command-line.
For example, replace this command
pdflatex example.tex
by
pdflatex '\def\colorscheme{dark}\input{example.tex}'
to get a dark color scheme.
This repository includes an example LaTeX document that you can build yourself:
switch to the example directory and run make dark or make light or make sepia.
This is what the PDF outputs look like:
light,
dark,
sepia.
Tips and Best Practices
If you use hyperref,
you may want to set colors for hyperlinks like this:
\hypersetup{colorlinks,linkcolor=textRed,citecolor=textRed,urlcolor=textBlue}
If you use colors in your document, you'll want to use different colors depending on the colorscheme. There are two ways I recommend:
- Use the pre-defined text colors for coloring text:
textRed,textBlue,textGreen. - Mix fully-saturated colors with
bgColor, e.g.,{red!10!bgColor}is 10% red.
Freedom to Use
© 2022 Eklavya Sharma
All code is licensed under the MIT license. This roughly means that you are free to use, modify, and distribute this code.