Themes, page colour and watermarks

The Design tab changes the look of the whole document: its theme, the page colour, a watermark and a border round the page.

Themes

A theme is a set of twelve colours and two fonts — one for headings, one for body text. Most Word documents don’t name colours and fonts directly. A heading says “accent colour 1, a little darker” rather than a particular blue, and body text says “the theme’s body font” rather than Calibri. Changing the theme changes what those references mean, so every style and every piece of text that uses them follows.

Apply a theme

1. On the Design tab, in the Themes group, click a theme swatch.

Each swatch shows four of the theme’s colours on its background colour. The theme in use has a highlighted outline. From left to right:

The theme is saved in the document, so Word shows the document in the same colours and fonts. To go back to the document’s previous theme — including a theme that came with the document from Word — press ⌘Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows and Linux).

On screen, theme colours change straight away. Theme fonts are saved in the document and used by Word; Writer draws text on screen in its own typeface. See Formatting text.

Theme colours in documents from Word

When Writer opens a Word document, it works out every theme colour and font the document refers to, including lighter tints and darker shades, so headings appear in the colours the author chose. A document without a theme uses the Office theme’s colours and fonts.

Page colour

1. On the Design tab, in the Page colour group, click a swatch: no colour (the swatch with a slash), cream, grey, blue or green.

The page on screen turns that colour. The swatch in use has a highlighted outline.

Watermark

A watermark is a word or phrase printed faintly and diagonally across every page, behind the text.

Add or change a watermark

1. On the Design tab, in the Watermark group, click the watermark button (Print words faintly across every page). When the document has a watermark, the tooltip shows its text.
2. In the Watermark dialog, do one of these:
   • Click DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL or COPY to use that word straight away.
   • Type your own text in the box and click Save, or press Return.

The watermark appears across the page on screen, and on every page when you print or export a PDF: grey, semi-transparent, at 45 degrees.

Writer saves the watermark the way Word’s own watermark command does — as a WordArt shape in the header — so it opens as an editable watermark in Word. If the document has no header, Writer creates one to hold the watermark; if it has one, the watermark is added to it without changing its text.

Remove a watermark

1. Click the watermark button on the Design tab.
2. In the Watermark dialog, click Remove.

Saving the dialog with an empty box also removes the watermark.

A text watermark from a Word document is saved unchanged unless you edit it.

Page border

1. On the Design tab, in the Page border group, click A rule round every page.

Writer draws a thin grey rule, 1 point wide, round every page. On screen it outlines the sheet. In print and PDF it sits 24 points in from the edge of the paper.

To remove it, click No page border. The highlighted button shows whether the document has a page border.

A page border from a Word document is drawn and printed using the colour and width of its top edge.