Why pages do not have dark mode?

Hi alitk,

Leave the text colour as black.

Adding to Jake's reply, you can insert a rectangle Shape into your document and set the rectangle to a colour that is easy on the eyes but still allows you to read the black text. I used Crayons > Magnesium.

Format Panel > Arrange > Object Placement > Stay on Page and Text Wrap > None.

Drag to make the rectangle fill a whole page (I find that it "snaps" to the page edges).

With the rectangle selected, Menu > Arrange > Section Masters > Move Objects to Section Master.

The rectangle will now be in the background of every page of that Section.

Menu > Edit > Select All.

Format > Text > (Gear wheel) > Advanced Options > Text Background > None (bottom right of the Colour Chooser) to make the text transparent and allow the background rectangle to show through (no white around the text!).

Menu > File > Print

Untick Print page backgrounds (if your print dialogue has that option). The document will print black text on a white background.

That setting carries through to a PDF (the PDF button bottom left > Open in Preview). The PDF document will print black text on a white background.

Happy Paging!

Regards,

Ian.

Pages v11.1 has not been written to respond to appearance modes for its body text. The consequence of choosing a blank black template (default white text) is that your exported content (PDF, Word) will have the same appearance. Thus no dark appearance while you compose the document and then export as traditional white body text with black font.

You will need to explore if other word processing applications provide an appearance mode, but always export to white body text and black font. LibreOffice Writer allows you to right-click on the body text, and set its Area tab to black. This gives you a black page with default white text, that when saved as a docx, the reverse of these colors is saved. However, saving it to a PDF does not reverse the colors — black PDF with white text results.

There is one way to employ dark mode using Pages at least when you are composing a document. Open Pages, click All Templates and click on a template that says Black Blank. Then choose light text color or whatever text color suits you. Not certain if there is any other way to accomplish this using Pages as there is in other Mac native apps and many third party apps.

You are quite correct (as usual) VikingOSX. I had overlooked the issues that would result if my suggestion were followed. Well done.