<***@aol.com> wrote
| I am using the standard windows "dark" theme. One of the half dozen
| you can choose with a click. The problem is that bleeds to the print
| driver in wordpad and note pad so you end up making carbon paper.
That's pretty good. Carbon paper is not so easy to find these
days. :)
It's natural that it will print what you see. That's what it's
supposed to do. Though a 3rd-party editor will probably ignore
the display settings for a text window, allowing you to choose.
I use a system RichEdit in my own software and that's unaffected
by system settings. Which makes sense. Otherwise how could
I offer font face/color/size options? And an RTF file has color
options built into the file as text-based encoding. So what you
see is likely a "paint" level overlay done by Explorer.
As JJ noted, some displays are also skins. For example, XP's
"Fischer Price" look is actually a skin of images painted on top
of the window frame. With Win7 I'm not sure. Given the curved
corners under Aero, and the ridiculous amount of processing it
takes to paint translucent grass in folder frames, I'm guessing
that's it's probably painted rather than skinned, but with a complex
formula. It can't just say "title bar from x1 to x2, 30 pixels high,
goes dark blue". It has to partially work from an image, or work
from an extremely comple formula at each moment as the desktop
is repainted.
In other words, painting means keeping track of what pixel gets
what color. Skinning means painting on a small image repeatedly
to construct something like a title bar. In some cases, with static
objects, it can also mean paitning the whole window as an object,
as with a music player that looks like a boom box.
That's probably more than you care to know, but it becomes
relevant sometimes. For example, if I allowed the default blue
frames on XP, that's a skin. The images are stored in Media or
some such. So I can't choose to do something like make the blue
lighter. I'd have to switch off the Fischer Price to do that.
If it were me in your situation I'd try changing the "window"
properties on the Display Appearance tab and see if it will modify
the dark theme. Otherwise, go back to regular and then modify
everything else. But, my usual caveat: I'm currently on XP.
I have Win7 and 10 but I haven't checked this idea on those.
(I use 7 only to stream Netflix on one of the TVs.)
In my experience, display options have become increasingly
more confused and limited. MS don't want options. They want
to impose consistency to make things easier for them. So
every time I go into display settings I seem to find that I'm in
the wrong place. (Come to think of it, that happens on Win10
with everything.) Since I don't use 7 and 10 for much, I mostly
just settle for finding the "classic" look and then leave it alone.
The other day the computer icon disappeared from the Win10
desktop. Nothing worked to make a new icon. On XP I can just
open Explorer and right-drag the icon to the desktop. I had to
finally go online to find out how to get it back.