[E McElroy[_2_]]

It sounds like you're very close to what you want except for the highlighting
problem. I had a chance to look at the possible solution of changing system
colors which I mentioned in a previous note. Restating the current difficulty
is probably a good way to start:

Problem:
======
When the page background is blue, the gray selection or highlight rectangle
is difficult to see.


Changing the System Colors (XP Pro OS):
===========================
The system colors are settable to reflect individual preferences and to help
people with vision difficulties; at least that was the intent. I set two
system colors using the Control Panel which allows changes to a subset of the
settable colors: windows and window text were set to blue and white,
respectively. Word 2007 does pay attention to the system colors: default page
backgrounds were now a deep blue and the default font was white. However, the
default color of other style fonts was not white: on my machine, the Heading
1 font was red. So, while Word is making some adjustments to reflect the
system colors, the result may not be what you want without further changes to
font colors. Additionally, there was no effect on the selection problem:
selections were still highlighted by putting the selection inside a gray box
which is not easy to see on a blue page.

Changing the system colors had other side effects, including some very
interesting ones: looking at Outlook and Internet Explorer, it's obvious that
some programmers were checking the system colors and others were not. The
Dates Received column, for instance, is pure white in Outlook while the
lettering in other areas remains black. Internet Explorer did the right thing
in some ways: a successful find encloses the located word in a white
selection box which stands out nicely on a blue field but other areas were
improperly colored. I could go on but it's clear that current software
offerings from MS are not being sufficiently tested to see if they gracefully
handle changes in the system colors so this may not be a good solution for
you overall.

Programming:
=========
I did a quick look around at some of the Word objects and didn't see any
obvious way to tell Word how to display a selected or highlighted area. The
problem is not a simple one in the general case since color backgrounds can
vary quite a bit in different sections of a document. In your case, however,
the background and the font colors seem to be constant so a programming
solution might be possible if Word or Office doesn't provide a simpler way.
I'll take a further look to get a better handle on the problem and will get
back to you.

Ed McElroy

"DCH" wrote:

Thank you thank you for taking the time to explain all this, McElroy. Some
of it is over my head but I have worked out a partial (though not very
elegant) solution: I put the "Page Background" icon on the Quick Access
Toolbar. Creating a new document, I click on the Page Background icon and
choose dark blue and the text automatically comes up white. Perfect. It
requires three clicks to get a new blue-background/white text page for every
new document but I can live with that. The major problem is that "found"
text (text found by the "Find and Replace" function) is highlighted in either
dark gray or black, which is almost impossible to find against the dark blue
background. If "found" text were highlighted in almost any other color, such
that I could see it against the blue background, I would be a happy man
("over the moon" as my daughter says). Is it possible to change the color of
"found" text? Thank you again for your time and help McElroy.

DCH


"E McElroy" wrote:

There is a way to get white text on a blue background in Word 2007 by using
the following recipe:

1. In the Page Backround group of the Page Layout tab, click Page Color and
select a shade of blue - this is the blue background.

2. Type a line of text and then place the insertion point inside a word of
text.

3. Right click on the selected text and choose Font from the menu.

4. On the Font dialog box select white in the Font Color drop down list box.
The word containing the insertion point will turn white.

5. Without moving the insertion point, right click again and choose Styles
from the context menu. This displays a submenu.

6. From the submenu choose Save Selection As A New Quick Style. This
displays the Create New Style From Formatting dialog box.

7. In the Create New Style From Formatting dialog box, enter the name of the
Style. If you used say, the "Heading 1" style for the text, then you might
want to call it "White Font Heading 1".

You can alter steps 6 and 7 to change the existing style to have white font
- choose Update Heading 1 To Match Selection in step 6.

You can see there is a bit of tedium initially: for every style of font you
use, at the beginning you will need to create a white font version of it or
change it to use white font. However, most documents aren't likely to use a
huge number of styles and over time you'll have a big collection which you
can store in your normal template file. In fact, a good start might be to
edit the normal template file and simply change all the styles to use white
font.

Perhaps some other folks here can suggest ways to reduce the initial tedium
by utilizing themes or some other technique.

Some time ago, I believe Word took it's cue from the setting of the system
colors for window and window text. Whether that's true now in 2007 with
themes I don't know. One of the major goals behind the implementation of
system color and font settings was to help people with less than optimal
vision to use Windows. This would be worth exploring if the above approach is
unsuitable or excessively tedious.

E McElroy

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