nisus.com

I know I'm in a vastly minority position here, but I have always GREATLY preferred a computer screen that displayed light text on a dark background.

Ironically, I find some validation for this in the OS X 'Universal Access - Switch to White on Black' help information which confirms that this type of display is easier to view.

...you can choose different screen contrasts to make the screen easier to view. Choose a screen contrast effect in the Universal Access pane of System Preferences.

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click Universal Access. Then click Seeing.
To remove colors from the screen, click "Set Display to Grayscale."
To make the computer screen appear as a photonegative (with white text on a black background), click "Switch to White on Black."

I have done some searches here and played with my newly purchased NWE, but have not been able to set the text to display this way without compromising the printed version.

It's nice to be able to set the Draft view background to black, but I assume that there's no way to change the text to, say, light green without also coding that color into the Page View and printed versions of the doc.

-If I'm wrong, I'd love to know how to do this.
-As I've always been in the minority on this, I don't suspect there'd be a lot of support for putting this feature on the development list. I simply have never understood why people want that Cathode Ray Tube, (or flatscreen now) shooting maximum white light into their eyeballs. Black is so much more soothing. Just my 2 cents. Thanks for any responses that share my preference.

One possibility is to have all style sheets be built on Normal (with sub groups, i.e. all text styles built on BodyBase, and all headings built on Heading Base). Change Normal to be a light color, and all other styles change accordingly. Then right before you make final draft preparations, change the font color of Normal again to Black, and all other styles follow along. It works, but maybe not the most efficient.

It might be nice to be able to set various styles to look different in draft and page view modes. That way you could have Normal be white text in draft mode and black text in page view mode. Unfortunately I can't immediately think of a nice interface for this but maybe someone else can.