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Chrome PDF Tools
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Four buttons Chrome's PDF viewer is missing.

A small extension for Chrome, Brave and Edge. It adds dark mode, sepia mode, a way to hide the toolbar and a fullscreen button, right next to the viewer's own controls.

Download ZIP Source

Free and open source. Loaded as an unpacked extension, in about a minute.

Try it: the same page in each mode.

Chrome's PDF viewer showing a sample document. Four extra round buttons sit in the toolbar at the top right: an eye, a moon, a coffee cup and fullscreen corners. The same document in dark mode: a black page with white text. The moon button is highlighted, and the toolbar, sidebar and background around the page are unchanged. The same document in sepia mode: a warm, cream-coloured page, with the viewer around it unchanged. The coffee cup button is highlighted. The same document with the viewer's toolbar and sidebar hidden. The four buttons float over the top right corner of the page.
Real screenshots of version 1.2 on a sample PDF, in Chrome.

What each button does

Hide the toolbar

Removes the viewer's toolbar and sidebar so the page gets the whole window. Click again to bring them back.

Dark mode

A black page with white text, and colours that keep close to their original hue. Only the page changes; the viewer around it stays as it is.

Sepia mode

A warm tint over the page, for long reading sessions.

Fullscreen

One click instead of F11. The four buttons hide while you're in fullscreen and come back when you leave.

Put the buttons where you want them

Click the extension's icon in the browser toolbar to open its panel. The slider moves the buttons left or right on the open PDF as you drag.

  • The position is saved, so it's the same the next time you open the browser.
  • Dark or sepia stays on in that tab when you hide or show the toolbar.
  • Nothing leaves your browser. The extension asks only for storage and the active tab.
The extension's panel: a Button position slider set to 170 pixels from the right with a Reset button, a list of the four buttons and what they do, and a note about allowing access to file URLs.

Install it in four steps

Load it as an unpacked extension

  1. Download the ZIP and extract it to a folder you'll keep.
  2. Open your browser's extensions page: chrome://extensionsbrave://extensionsedge://extensions
  3. Turn on Developer mode.
  4. Click Load unpacked and pick the extracted folder.

For PDFs on your computer

Out of the box the extension works on PDFs opened from websites. For files on your own drive, open the extension's Details on the extensions page and turn on Allow access to file URLs.

Prefer a single file? The Releases page also has a .crx package, though Chrome and Brave sometimes block those.

Open source, MIT licensed

Download ZIP
  • Chrome
  • Brave
  • Edge
  • Manifest V3

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