Note background colors

Is anyone else frustrated by the fact that you can only have text notes in DTP with one background colour - white? Sometimes you badly want or need to use different colors, especially if you’re working with a lot of text notes open independently for brainstorming, project management, planning, etc. In fact, the fonts palette, being the standard OS X palette, does include the option, but it’s dead. This seems a strange lapse in an app as sophisticated and generally brilliant as DTP.

Doubly so, in fact, as you can create a simple RTF document in another app - TextEdit, for example - color the background with the very same palette, and import it into DTP with no problem. This provides a workaround but is laborious, and it seems curious that the option doesn’t work in the same kind of doc created natively in DTP.

Any chance of including this simple option in the future? Or even of going further and allowing backgrounds of different textures and designs?

Try this:

In DTP, create an RTF note.
Choose FORMAT menu > Show Colors.
Select the “Background” box and click on the color you want.

All text you type will now have that color as the background. If you choose you can also have multiple colors in the same document.

BTW, this also works with the Font palette:
FORMAT > Font > Show Fonts and click on the color box icon next to the document icon.

Hope this helps.

Hi, jesswin. Thanks for the suggestion. I had done this, but the problem is that it’s really just glorified highlighting, so only goes where the text goes. It‘s okay, but isn’t the same. If you want the whole window coloured you have to hit return for as far as you want, then arrow-key back up again, and so on, and you always have white margins at the sides. A clumsy workground, really, when background colours is a normal feature of the OS which for some weird reason is simply dead in DTP.

Thanks, though.

Don’t recall a similar request, except in the case of full-screen display.

If you are using background color for classification purposes, why not consider using labels, which (unlike background color) provide a searchable characteristic.

Although the label color is visible only in the document Name list of views, a combination of Label and highlighting might be advantageous. Highlighting also has the advantage that the Go menu allows movement to the next or previous highlighted instance.

I would also change the background color, if I had an option. I fell that white backgrounds give strain to the eye.

Hi Bill. This may seem a small point, unless you are using DTP for brainstorming and other purposes where variable backgrounds are important. I also suspect that many users, like physicistjedi, would value this simply for ease on the eye. The labels solution really isn’t much of a workround for such purposes - clumsy, to say the least.

But the main point is simple: why doesn’t an RTF note in DTP, a sophisticated and not uncostly app, do what is standard for any RTF doc in the simplest of other apps, and which is taken for granted in the OS?

I simply feel that taking the brightness down to 95% is easier to look at. I would like to have this option for all new files created within dt.

The next maintenance release will support rich text document background colors.

I’m surprised this point about a maintenance release hasn’t been picked up, given the amount of pent-up anticipation there is for DTP 2.

If there is to be an update before Leopard/DTP 2, can I suggest that you give some attention to the highlighter. I don’t often use this because the colour is far too vibrant. Take a look at how the colours are more muted in MacJournal, or Nisus Writer Express, to see how this might be done in a way that’s easy on the eye. They also allow a choice of colours, which I would find very useful. Finally, the highlighted area should be only within the text margins (as in Nisus) and not extend the full width of the page. :slight_smile: