Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Ben V

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 11, 2023
4
0
Dear fellow community,

I am an author and have been using the default Pages writing app for writing and printing my books. It works very smoothly and I have just about all the features I need, but I did come accross one roadblock:

I want to use it in dark mode. It's extremely important to be looking at a dark screen if I'm doing it for so many hours in my day: I care about my eyesight. It's also important to be able to use print-to-pdf without a black background, because obviously the final result will be a printed book with white pages and black text.

So far, it's been working to change the page background-color to black, and then when I'm printing I untick the checkbox "print page backgrounds". It works, but it changes all the other formatting too: textboxes that used to have a background color are now transparent... And I use black textboxes with white text when I need to add a caption to inline photos. The text turns black and the textboxes turn transparent...

Any alternative way to save as pdf, without losing all the other formatting in the document, but only removing the dark page-background-color, and changing the inline text from white to black?

The closest thing I found was to manually remove the background-color-fill prior to printing, but I can't do that document-wide. I need to do it section by section... and then I need to change all the text to black, style by style... A lot of work for every time I print! Maybe a script that would say "turn all page backgrounds to white and convert all inline text to black..."?

Or if at least I could change the text color for multiple styles at once, instead of style-by-style?

Thank you most dearly for any advice!
 

usagora

macrumors 601
Nov 17, 2017
4,869
4,451
Unfortunately, I don't believe Pages has a setting to make the actual page dark in dark mode too like Microsoft Word does. You could turn on the "inverse colors" settings in your macOS accessibility settings to achieve a dark-colored page, but then the rest of the interface will now be light, but maybe that's better than nothing? I also don't see a way to set Pages to light mode (so that everything would be dark when you inverse the colors) unless you change the entire system-wide setting.

Maybe someone else will have a better answer (short of switching to MS Word)!
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.