I want to produce a PDF that looks good on the screen in color. Of course if I do that well with color backgrounds and all, the same document will look lousy when printed on a monochrome laser printer. E.g. consider a text box with color background. The background will go through a dithering algorithm which often enshitifies the text layer on top of that. Likewise on mono e-readers.

In principle, the doc needs two different representations. One for color and one for mono. As rich as the PDF standard is, I don’t think I have ever seen a PDF with multiple modes. So LaTeX aside, does the PDF standard even support this?

I can think of a hack using PDF layers which is supported by the ocgx2 LaTeX package. Color backgrounds could be isolated to a switchable layer. This is not great though because the end user needs to be aware of the layer and must take a manual action to turn off the background layer before printing as black and white. And still, non-black foreground text will print as gray unless foreground text is in a layer too (yikes).

Am I S.O.L?