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Print Page Colors

Print Page Colors let you set the page background, text color and border color for your printed book. You can set them for the whole book at once, or for a single section on its own.

Set Colors for the Whole Book

  1. Open the Print Settings menu.
  2. Under Page Colors & Backgrounds, choose Page Colors.
  3. Set your colors. Every change shows in the print preview right away.

You can set three things book-wide:

  • Background (under All Pages). The color behind every page.
  • Text (under All Pages). The color of your body text on every page.
  • Border color (under Borders). The color of every border and rule that has no color of its own, described in Border Color below.

Leave any of them on Default to keep the colors your book’s style already uses.

Set Colors for One Section

When a single section needs its own look, for example a tinted page behind a chapter opener, set its colors from that section instead:

  1. Open the section’s Options menu (see the Section Options Menu).
  2. Choose Set Section’s Background, then Set Print Page Colors.
  3. Set the Background and Text color for this section, and its Border color under Borders.

A section’s colors override the book-wide colors for that section only, border color included. Clear them to go back to the book-wide setting.

Border Color

Border color tints every border and rule in your printed book that has no color of its own: callout boxes, subheadings, image captions, tables, columns, grids, line rows, section title and subtitle underlines, ornamental lines, table of contents entry borders, and the header and footer lines. Set it for the whole book, or for one section on its own.

Each of those elements can also have a color of its own, chosen in its style panel. A border prints in the first of these that is set:

  1. The color chosen in the element’s own style panel.
  2. The section’s Border color.
  3. The book’s Border color.
  4. Black.

Default is the empty choice: a border left on Default moves on to the next step. The How Border Color Works tooltip beside every border color picker says the same thing. (An ornamental line on Default matches your text color instead of black. Books started in an earlier version of Lacuna keep their gray line.)

Page colors are part of your print settings, so your EPUB does not use them. To give a border the same color in every e-reader, choose its color in the element’s own style panel. A chosen color also stays the same in an e-reader’s dark mode, while a border on Default turns light there.

Books made in an earlier version of Lacuna open looking exactly as they did before.

A Note on Print Color

Printed books use CMYK ink rather than the RGB colors a screen shows. When Lacuna builds your print preview, it converts your colors from RGB to CMYK (the SWOP color profile), so a few colors may not match the screen exactly. Bright, highly saturated colors are the most likely to shift. Pick colors a little softer than you might for a screen, and trust the print preview over the color picker.

  • Section Options Menu: set a single section’s background and colors.
  • Background Images: put a picture behind the page instead of a flat color, on one page or across two facing pages.