Expert: James Fritz - 2/4/2010

Question
QUESTION: We do a small school paper and have been using InDesign but have stepped up to CS4 and thought the background looking white as we work if we print the print area of the paper is gray. I would like to know how to get rid of the color so when we print we have a plain white background. This is not just a picture but the full 9.883 by 12 page. thanks for your help

ANSWER: Hi Rene,

By default InDesign assumes that you are going to be printing on white paper and that is why the background of the program looks white. If you are printing on a colored paper (or gray like your newspaper) it will look white on screen, but when you print it out it will show up differently since you are printing on paper that is a different color.

Printers can't print a white ink (unless you get a special type of ink which is very expensive) and therefore how it looks onscreen may look different when you print it out because you are printing on colored paper. There really is no way to "print white" on to your newspaper. you can really only not print something which will leave the color of your paper open (which would be the grey color).

Does that answer your question?



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Good morning, I guess I didn't ask the question quite right. We print the pages out on plain white printer paper to edit (print to fit the 8X11) printer paper for that purpose. When we are printing on the white 8X11 paper the background of our pages is gray. The amount of ink wasted is large so I am trying to get rid of the gray backgound for this printing problem. When we go to press in May we will have printed out houndreds of pages to be edited so help with this problem would be very helpful.

We started out using InDesign at least 5 years ago and have never had this problem with the background color so I think it must have something to do with a setting in the CS4 but have not come up with the right form of the question to lead me to the answer on my template.
Sincerely
Rene

ANSWER: Does the layout look gray on screen? If you are seeing the gray on screen it would printout that way too. Maybe there is a large gray box in the background on every page. Check your layers and the master page to make sure there is nothing placed at those locations which would cause your layout to output gray.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: The template pages look white but when we print it comes out gray background. No small box with x anywhere on the page. I brought up my original template in basic InDesign and printed the template and it is white background. When I bring the template up in CS4 it prints with a gray background. The settings look the same when I compare them from old machine to newer one.

Answer
That is a really strange behavior. If you make a new document inside CS4 does it still come out gray or does it output normal (white)?

What you can do is make a new document and just copy and paste in place everything from the old document to the new document and try printing. If everything seems ok, just make the new document your template.