[Tex/LaTex] How to print in white text over black background

colorfontsprinting

I already have set a document with text and image. On the whole document:

Is it possible to make the white background go set to black?

That is: text in white color & background in black color.

I know this is very anti-economical print-wise, but it's for artistic purposes. In this approach I would only be printing the black sections in a regular printer.

There's also a black and white image, and gray too (cc symbol). If I can keep that in original colors it'd be best. (Or not! ..oh my! I have to check how it looks)

This has been done before but not on such a big scale of page:

Perhaps an option to invert colors in full document?

This would change the image. But since it's only one maybe that can be inverted too.

Another chance could be to just take the .tex file and format the color of text (and leaving background unchanged): change black (standar) color of letters to white and get a proper printer and use black paper as background. It'd be great to hear ideas on this option too. Although printing with white ink on black-tainted pages may be even more expensive than the 1st option…

SeRe's answer is just great. I'm just going to add a mwe of my own because I had some frames that went back to default and I wanted to post how I managed to customize them to be as the rest of the document. Any other ideas on how to do this are more than welcome.

\documentclass[12pt]{report}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{pagecolor}
\usepackage{lipsum}  
\usepackage{mdframed}

\pagecolor{black}
\color{white}

\begin{document}
\lipsum[2]

\begin{mdframed}[backgroundcolor=black,linecolor=white,fontcolor=white]
\texttt{\textbf{Yes! Customized.}} \\
In any right triangle, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse
is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares whose sides are the two
legs.\end{mdframed}

\mdfapptodefinestyle{example1}{backgroundcolor=brown!20,linecolor=red!40!black,linewidth=4pt}
\begin{mdframed}[style=mdfexample1]\textit{No: Default mdframed.} \\Not desirable white backgroundcolor and text in black.\end{mdframed}
\lipsum[3]
\end{document}

Best Answer

 \documentclass[a4, 12pt]{report}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{pagecolor}
\usepackage{lipsum}  

\pagecolor{black}
\color{white}

\begin{document}

\lipsum
\lipsum
\lipsum


\end{document}

This gives you as global pagecolor black and as global textcolor white. I think that this is what you're looking for. For further information, you can also have a look on the pagecolor package

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] white text on black background in entire table

You can do this with the [table] option of xcolor (which uses colortbl):

You can use the array package to define column types whose colour is black. E.g.

\newcolumntype{B}{>{\columncolor{black}\color{white}}c}}

defines a B column which is identical to a c column, but black with white text. You can also define similar column types for the other types of columns (l, p and m, for example). For p column types, you need to add hspace{0pt} at the beginning of the cell to avoid odd spacing issues.

\newcolumntype{L}{>{\columncolor{black}\color{white}}l}}
\newcolumntype{P}[1]{>{\columncolor{black}\hspace{0pt}\color{white}}p{#1}}
\newcolumntype{M}[1]{>{\columncolor{black}\hspace{0pt}\color{white}}m{#1}}

Here's an example using each type.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}
\usepackage{array}
\begin{document}
\arrayrulecolor{white}
\newcolumntype{B}{>{\columncolor{black}\color{white}}c}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\columncolor{black}\color{white}}l}
\newcolumntype{P}[1]{>{\columncolor{black}\hspace{0pt}\color{white}}p{#1}}
\begin{tabular}{|B|L|P{1in}|}
\hline
A & B & C \\
\hline
D & E & F \\
\hline
G & H & I \\
\hline
J & K & L \\
\hline
M & N & O \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

output of code

[Tex/LaTex] Create PDF with images in black and white

Ghostscript can convert color documents into grayscale. Example commandline:

gs \
 -o grayscale.pdf \
 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
 -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray \
 -sProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray \
  /path/to/your.pdf

The most recent version of Ghostscript can also check for the CMYK ink coverage of PDF documents (not image by image, but page by page), using a new "device" called inkcov. Check for the ink coverage of an example PDF:

gs -o - -sDEVICE=inkcov /path/to/your.pdf

Example output:

Page 1
0.00000  0.00000  0.00000  0.02230 CMYK OK
Page 2
0.02360  0.02360  0.02360  0.02360 CMYK OK
Page 3
0.02525  0.02525  0.02525  0.00000 CMYK OK
Page 4
0.00000  0.00000  0.00000  0.01982 CMYK OK

Here 1.00000 would mean 100%, 0.02525 means 2.525% and 0.00000 means 0% ink coverage. You can see here that pages 1+4 are using no color, while pages 2+3 do. This case is particularly 'nasty' for people who want to save on color ink: because all the C, M, Y (and K) values are exactly the same for each of the pages 2+3, they possibly could appear to the human eye not as color pages, but as grayscale (or "rich" grayscale in the case of page 3) anyway. (That is, if each single pixel is mixed with these color values -- of course, if the page is made by four different squares of the same size using "pure" colors each, then you'd get the same ink coverage result).

Now convert the original PDF to a grayscale one, using the command I initially gave. Then check for the ink coverage distribution again (note how the addition of -q to the parameters slightly changes the output format):

gs -q  -o - -sDEVICE=inkcov grayscale.pdf
 0.00000  0.00000  0.00000  0.02230 CMYK OK
 0.00000  0.00000  0.00000  0.02360 CMYK OK
 0.00000  0.00000  0.00000  0.02525 CMYK OK
 0.00000  0.00000  0.00000  0.01982 CMYK OK