SoftwareLampkaPDF readerdark modeWindowsreading
Lampka, a Free Windows PDF Reader, Turns Pages Dark at Night Without Inverting Photos and Diagrams
The beta has six reading themes plus a custom one, remembers a file by its contents instead of its name, and runs with no servers behind it. Its pages name no maker.
Anyone who has flipped a PDF viewer into a blanket color invert knows the result. The text goes light on dark, which is what you wanted. The photos turn into film negatives and the color-coded chart becomes a puzzle in the wrong colors.
Lampka does it differently. The manual says that in its themes, “Text and paper change colour while photos, diagrams and coloured drawings keep theirs.” A setting turns that off if you’d rather have everything inverted. There are six themes, Day, Sepia, Dusk, Night, Midnight and Amber, plus a custom one, and brightness and contrast are saved for each. An evening mode switches between day and night themes by itself. A separate option, “Make dark pages match the theme too,” recolors pages that were designed dark in the first place.
The reading tricks go further. The manual says “Lampka recognises a document by its contents, so your place, highlights and notes survive renaming or moving the file.” That’s a fix for the thing every reader hits sooner or later: a book you finished half of, renamed, and lost your place in. A reading ruler helps keep your line, bookmarks use the document’s own page labels, and find and copy are free.
Pro adds the heavier tools: citation and link previews, split view, highlights and notes with Markdown export, offline read-aloud using your computer’s own voices, and sync through your own OneDrive, iCloud Drive or Dropbox folder. The manual says every new install includes 14 days of Pro, and after that free reading continues. The home page’s pricing text mentions a founder’s offer and the manual says Pro is a one-time purchase, but I couldn’t read a price, so check the site before you plan on a number.
The privacy line is the most direct sentence on the page: “Nothing goes through Lampka’s servers, because there aren’t any.” Update checks against lampka.app are optional, and the manual says the program “only reads your PDFs. It never changes them.”
The limits are on the same page. It’s Windows 10 and 11 only, and “Lampka for Mac isn’t available yet.” Scanned pages have no selectable text, so there is nothing for the theme to recolor, read aloud or search. PDFs that disallow printing or copying have those actions disabled in Lampka too, and notes exported from them leave out the highlighted text.
One thing the site doesn’t say is who makes it. The manual’s footer shows “Lampka” and a 2026 copyright with a support email, and nothing names a person or company. For a program that reads your documents, that’s worth knowing before you install a beta, even with no servers to send them to.
Six themes, and not one of them tells you who built it.