White Background in Mathcad

[JC_10126579]

Can you change the color of the Mathcad sheet background? Why is this still an issue in 2025?

[DJNewman]

You cannot.

It's not trivial to just have a background colour picker; you need to make sure the user interface is still readable after the background colour changes.

Up to this point, Mathcad Prime has been designed assuming that one background colour.

Is it solvable for the development team to do that? Yes! But "dark mode", while frequently requested, is still less requested than a host of other priorities.

[JC_10126579]

It would be nice then if the background was truly white so I can take a quick screenshot of my formulas. It's really cumbersome having to print my sheets and take a screenshot of those. 

Hope there's enough of push for this and the developers do something about it. So far Mathcad 15 was way more superior for easy engineering calcs.

[DJNewman]

Oh, you don't want dark mode, you want more white and not off-white. Then, yeah, the "cumbersome" thing would be saving your sheets as an RTF (or PDF) and opening it in Word's pure-white background. Fortunately you can do multiple formulas at once this way.

I have a lot of personal experience with this in the course of each new Mathcad Prime release since Prime 7 gets a cool-looking key art, and that incorporates authentic "floating math" in the backgrounds, and that involves having them on a Mathcad Prime worksheet (and big font and bold) and saving as RTF / PDF. And then the artists import each formula as a Photoshop layer in this case.

[JeffH1]

I use TechSmith "SnagIt" to take my screen shots of equations, etc. and it allows me to very quickly replace the background color with pure white in the screenshot image.  There are probably other tools that allow this as well, but Windows Snip Tool won't.

[JeffH1]

@DJNewman 

I disagree.  It is trivial.  Not asking for a "Dark Mode", just to be able to change it from the "off white" on the screen to pure white, or even some other faint color (like the green engineering pads) that would actually print.  Not sure why someone thought that off-white background was a good idea.

Personally, I long for the ability to use an image as the background that would include our corporate letterhead.  We create official papers and engineering documents that have our corporate letterhead across the top.  Unfortunately, our letterhead includes a graphic that goes from page edge to page edge.  Mathcad Primes header/footer regions don't allow this and also don't allow a different first page header/footer.   Being able to insert a background image would allow it to span to the page bleed.

[Werner_E]

When you select just one math region and copy&paste  it, it will be pasted with a pure white background!

Unfortunately copy and paste won't work with multiple regions at once because copy&paste was severely broken in Prime starting from its first version.

You may consider using a program like SnagIt to do the screenshots. This program offers rudimentary image processing options and would allow to replace one color (the off-white)  for another one (pure white).

Still an extra step but sure more convenient and also better in quality compared to printing the worksheet and scanning the printout or printing to RTF/PDF and making the screenshot from the display of the appropriate program (Word/Adobe Reader).

But I agree that we could expect that the background/'paper' color could be changed by the user.
But I also agree with @DJNewman  that there are so many more urgent and serious issues in Prime that need to be addressed that the 'paper' color setting option is not of highest priority.