Printing in white

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Does anybody know of a way to print white characters just using an ordinary printer? I have a dark blue paper that I need to print on and black or any other color other than white just won’t show up.

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I don’t know whether color printers (inkjet or laser) can mix colors to get white. Is there such a thing as “white toner”?

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Has anyone come across an inkjet cartridge which contains bleach?

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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One question, what is the brand and model of your printer ?

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believe it or not I ACTUALLY DID find a site that sells WHITE INK cartridges. brace yourself though for the pricing because depending on the printer, it listed some cartridges that were like $620 but you might can find what you need here
http://shopping.yahoo.com/search?p=white%20ink%20cartridge

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You REALLY have to want to print white to pay that price. But at least there really is such a thing out there. GO FIGURE!!

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I don’t think that is something you can really do. If you are referring to light, then using “all” colors in the visible spectrum you get white. HOWEVER, with respect to using paints or in this case inks, mixing ALL colors produces black. So, even though you can type the font in white in word, it would NOT print white, since for ink if you will it is the absense of ink and since you have paper that is blue it wouldn’t print.
Does that make sense ?

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My printer is just a run of the mill Canon MP250.

Thanks for the site but too rich for my blood. (ink) :rolleyes:

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Here’s a more sensible answer, filched from another website:

Inkjet printer inks are dye-based, and that’s the reason.

Perhaps this will help explain things. You know those little boxes of food colouring you can buy in the supermarket – the ones that have four little bottles of colour – red, blue, yellow and green. Within reason you can combine these to turn white icing into most colours. Use nothing and the icing is still white or use everything and the icing will go a black-brown colour. Use a couple of drops of red and blue and you’ll get purple.

But if you start with black icing, there’s nothing you can add that will make it anything but black.

It’s the same with your inkjet printer – because white is obtained by not having any ink print on the white paper. But of course that only works when the paper is white. Naturally you’ll get different results on all colours of paper, decreasing as the paper gets darker in colour. Print blue on yellow paper and you should get green printing.

The only way to print in white is to do what commercial printers do – use opaque inks and include a white ink in the process. And as far as I know there’s no commercial ink that will do that with an inkjet printer.

I can hear lots of you muttering “Rubbish. Of course you can print light colours on dark paper.” Well all I can say is, have fun experimenting, but you won’t be able to do it.
Paul Zucker

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Insted of using blue paper use white paper and with your software make the background blue. That way you will get white print on a blue background. It’s gonna take some ink but it’s way less that $620 for white.

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Since you said that black does not show very well on the blue paper, try the following:-
Change to a black shading in the text area and then change font colour to white.

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You could also test the following, – change the shading to a light grey background and use BOLd white text to have it show better.

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Have you thought about printing in a very pale yellow? This will show up as OFF-white on dark paper.

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I would try a very light yellow or very light gray.

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Why don’t you visit a commercial printer (i.e. a local print shop)? They already have the resources to print light colors on dark paper.

Standard Ink Jet and Laser printers are additive, not subtractive. This means they can go from light to dark (e.g. white paper with dark blue ink), but not dark to light.

People that gave silly responses to this, like “Try light yellow” or “print in bold” just don’t understand.

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Good clarification from jgstanley. Hadn’t thought it through, so had to experiment. HP Deskjet with all options set to heaviest ink deposit. Word doc on the darkest blue paper I have (not as dark as navy, admittedly, and washed out by cell cam flash. The bottom one is almost invisible on a white background (on screen).
27647-text-darkpaper

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This may not work for you, Norm201, because you want to use coloured paper, but for what it might be worth for some, in appropriate cases, one could create a text box (no background colour) onto the coloured *document*, and then type in black. Could be heavy on coloured inks, though.

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I work as a senior technical manager in the printing industry. jstanley got his terms mixed up. Color perception requires 3 things: light, the object being viewed, and the eyes. Objects appear a certain color because certain wavelengths of light are absorbed, and others reflected. Reflected light is the color we see. Dyes and pigments are subtractive (add them together to “subtract” color, (ultimately resulting in black) and wavelengths of light are added together to ultimately get white. White pigments printed on dark paper do not have the opacity to adequately cover at the printing film thicknesses involved to appear white. The only way I know to do this is to print the dark background, and print white fonts/images, which is a printing nothing in those areas.
If there is another way, I’d certainly like to know, but one would have to violate the laws of physics to do so…

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You shouldn’t think of going for a third party white ink cartridge for the Canon because the head will be polluted (heads are separate from the cartridges) and you will never get the colour balance back working correctly again.

Use yellow which should show up really well on dark blue as yellow and blue are ‘almost’ opposites on the colour wheel.

A possible solution may be to use a Text Box with a dark yellow background and make the font transparent using the No Fill option. I’ve attached a simple example. It is opposite to your request, but it will let you write clearly on the dark blue paper.

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