[Beth Melton]

Sorry, that should have been Page Layout tab, not Print Layout. (Too many
"Layouts"!)

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email cannot be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Coauthor of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/boo...x#AboutTheBook

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

"E McElroy" wrote in message
...
I'm sure DCH would appreciate something easier!

I'm not following this completely. Here's what I'm seeing: I press the
Print
Layout button at the bottom (I don't see a Print Layout tab - am I missing
something?); I do a rand() and black text appears on the white background;
I
pick Page Color as blue on the Page Layout tab; the result is still black
text on a blue background. Clicking in a random paragraph indicates that
the
font color is set to Automatic which is black.

What do I have to change in my sequence of steps?

Incidentally, my experiments playing around with the font colors has
resulted in a selection shading color which is a noticeably darker gray
than
it was before. Hopefully it will get back to normal after a reboot....

Ed McElroy

"Beth Melton" wrote:

Wouldn't it be easier to just use the Automatic font color and set the
Page
Color on the Print Layout tab to a dark color?

If you use the Automatic font color then Word will automatically swap the
darker and lighter colors for you. It will also swap the colors when you
print since the page color isn't automatically printed.

To try this:
- Create a new document
- On the first line type: =rand() and press Enter (this should provide
you
with some dummy text)
- On the Print Layout tab, click Page Color and point to a dark color.
Live
Preview should show you the automatic change once you select a color that
is
dark enough.
- Select the color and then switch to Print Preview

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email cannot be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Coauthor of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/boo...x#AboutTheBook

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

"E McElroy" wrote in message
...
Hi DCH:

I promised to get back to you after taking a longer look at the
problems
of
trying to implement white font on a blue screen in Word 2007. Here are
my
thoughts based on the experiments I've done and my current knowledge of
Word
2007:

CHANGING ALL FONT COLORS:
=========================
I took a look at setting the font color of all styles en masse and came
up
with a short macro to do this (it's not hard - the code is listed
below).
After running the macro, text was white in the standard styles (those
displayed in the Styles pane at the beginning of a new document), and
the
text color wasn't affected by themes. I inserted some "smart art"
diagrams
(where do they get those names?) and the diagram text was also white.

As I discuss below, there was at least one surprise and, of course,
there
are likely to be others since I didn't test every single feature in
Word
(I'm
far from knowing what all the features are, anyway). There are also
objects
that have to be colored white such as the lines of tables. That isn't
part
of
the code but can be added.

CHANGING THE SELECTION HIGHLIGHT:
=================================
I have not found a way to tell Word to change the highlight colors. Can
it
be done? Well, it can be simulated by actually altering the document
when
a
selection is made and restoring it when the selection is not. This is
doable
with the Selection object. However, this is not a trivial matter since
there
are many types of objects that can be selected, and highlighting
appropriate
for text may not be appropriate for other objects. Additionally, a fair
amount of bulletproofing code must be added to make sure that changes
to
the
document as part of the selection highlight process are not permanent
if
there should be a crash. I don't want to bother you with a lot of
detail
but,
while this might be possible, it could be a time-consuming task to do
it
properly, not only in code development but especially in testing.

CONCLUSION:
===========
Those familiar with the Word programming SDKs may know better ways to
try
to
solve this problem. From what I currently know, even if it were
possible
to
get Word 2007 to emulate a white on blue screen, it will take time and
carry
some initial risk. Your best approach in the short term, and quite
possibly
the long term, is the one you decided on initially: go back to Word
2003.
It's a painless solution and the functionality you want is supported by
MS
and will work without surprises.

CODE TO CHANGE STYLE FONT COLOR EN MASSE:
=========================================
For those who are interested, here is a simple macro which enumerates
the
styles and changes their font color. I counted 265 built-in styles,
only a
small subset of which have symbols defined. Touching one particular
style,
the one whose name is "Article / Section" had a very unusual side
effect:
it
added numbered list characteristics to the various Heading styles.
Hence,
there is code here to simply avoid it. I'm not sure when this style
comes
into play or what the implication is of not setting its color.

I found that setting only the Color property was not enough since some
of
the "emphasis" styles continued to go their own way. Changing the
ColorIndex
property solved that. There is another color property, ColorIndexBI,
which
I
did not set since the brief documentation for the property indicates
that
it's for right to left languages. If this is relevant, it should also
be
set.

Here is the macro:

Sub WhiteFont()
Dim CurStyle As Style
Dim CurDoc As Document

Set CurDoc = ActiveDocument

For CurIndex = 1 To CurDoc.Styles.Count Step 1
Set CurStyle = CurDoc.Styles(CurIndex)
If CurStyle.NameLocal "Article / Section" Then
CurStyle.Font.Color = wdColorWhite
CurStyle.Font.ColorIndex = wdWhite
End If
Next
End Sub

Of course, this can be improved for those who want to experiment:

1. If there is no ActiveDocument, the procedure should exit.
2. An up front dialog box can be added to allow the user to select the
color.
3. VBA has a simple Collection object which can be used to store the
initial
colors. This can provide the basis of a Restore function to put the
initial
colors back.

If anybody does any experiments along these lines I'd be curious to
hear
what your results are.

Ed McElroy

"DCH" wrote:

The deletion of the blue background/white text option in Word 2007 is
sending
me back to Word 2003. Can I uninstall Word 2007 and re-install Word
2003
while retaining the rest of Office 2007? And if so, can you tell me
how?

Many thanks for whatever suggestions anyone may have,

DCH