At 17:18 21/10/2019 -0400, Linda Hull wrote:
I'm a Windows and Linux user. Should the background of the margin area as well as the area where the text is, change?
That's an odd question, mainly because trying it out will show the answer in a matter of seconds - probably in less time than it takes to compose the message.
But there is probably a confusion here, since there are two separate concerns. The original questioner has confirmed that correcting Tools | Options... | OpenOffice | Appearance | Document background solved his problem. This setting creates a coloured background on the entire page area, but this is not reflected in any printed output; instead it is merely intended to create a different appearance and experience in the editing screen. Users may find it easier or more comfortable to work with a different display from the black-on-white that is probably desired and expected for the final printed output.
If you are concerned about the area outside the page margins, you may instead be thinking of how to create a coloured background on the printed page. And now you have a different problem, since most printers you are likely to be using will not print to the edge of the paper, so - although your document may appear with all-over colour in the editing screen, the final output will have messy unprinted stripes along its edges. (Professional printers print to the edges of their documents by printing on oversize paper - but still not to the edges - and trimming the document after it is printed.)
If your reaction to that is to say that you are not going to print the document but view it on screen, then you probably shouldn't be using a text (word processor) document anyway. Text document are structured in pages of the sizes that paper comes in precisely because they are intended for printing. If you want something to view on screen, you need something more like a web page, which can extend downwards indefinitely without breaks; alternatively, a presentation slide may fit the bill.
Could someone cover how to do that?
If you want the background to print, you need to use Format | Page... | Background instead. You will notice that any such coloured background extends only over the text area - within the margins. So as long as you have set sensible margins, the result can be printed faithfully. If you want to extend the background colour beyond the text, you need first to set the page margins to zero to achieve this. Now you need to restrict the text to the area inside the margins that you would have set; you can do this is various ways:
o Set indents and spacing in paragraph or paragraph style formatting. o Put your text in a suitably sized and positioned frame. o Put your text in a section. o Use three columns, with only the middle one containing your text. o Similarly use a three-column table. I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
