Wordpad annoyance

[Gene E. Bloch]

Yep, tried that too ...

OK, just trying to cover all aspects

And in truth I saw that what I originally wrote was not as clear as it
should have been.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 05 Aug 2011 22:00:23 GMT, BookWight <[email protected]>
wrote: []
Have you checked that there's a color cartridge in the printer? Without
color ink, you obviously can't print color, but it could be easy to
overlook, if you're concentrating on settings, etc.

Ummm ... yes there is a colour cartridge in, but we are trying NOT to
print a coloured background ....

You need some white ink?

lol ... ))

I have to give you credit for managing to see the humor/humour in what
is obviously an annoying situation.

Along those lines, I would like to suggest that it might be a trick by
the printer maker to sell more ink.

 

[karebai]

I have to give you credit for managing to see the humor/humour in what
is obviously an annoying situation.

Along those lines, I would like to suggest that it might be a trick by
the printer maker to sell more ink.

lmao .... using windows one has to keep a semblence of humour

 

[Bob I]

Yep, tried notepad, its fine ... dug out some old documents - as long
as its wordpad, the problem persists.

We are at the point of using one suggestion found through searches ...
copy the XP version of wordpad onto the new Win7 machine ... not
really a fix, but until we can get our hands on new version of Office,
it may have to do ....

Try this, open Internet Explorer, select File, Page Setup, and UNcheck
"print background colors and images".

Then go back, open Wordpad and try printing.

 

[Joe Morris]

Win7 Home premium 64bit ... now saving for new copy of Office (we have
Office XP, but want to upgrade).
Started using wordpad for small documents at the moment, but we get a
grey background printed on every document. Have tried printer
preferences, changing text colour, no joy.

Anyone have an idea ? ... have googled and found a few with the same
problem, but no real answers.

Not knowing anything about your printer this is a long shot...have you
checked the *printer* properties *from within Wordpad* to see if something
in the printer driver options been set to "print watermark" or "include
annoying background tint" or something simlar?

Joe Morris

 

[nomail]

Oh I wish we could ... dialup connection, time limit ... OO is just
too big, plus, as good as OO is, there are times when it breaks
documents made in Office, and Office breaks OO docs.

AbiWord is a good, free, word processing program and a small
download:
http://www.abisource.com/

Pete

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

oh ... forgot to mention ... we even tried no text at all ... still
got grey background printed ...

Presumably you still get it if you "print" to a .pdf, using one of the
PDF creators such as PDF995.

 

[thanatoid]

Oh I wish we could ... dialup connection, time limit ... OO
is just too big, plus, as good as OO is, there are times
when it breaks documents made in Office, and Office breaks
OO docs.

IMHO MS don't /really/ think many people, if anyone, use either
Wordpad or Notepad (since they snare people by a free limited
time Office) so they haven't done much with them. The only thing
that has occurred to me is that the grey background is printing
because one of colors of your desktop scheme is automatically
adopted by Wordpad as the background color for WP printing.
Idiotic, but that's MS.

But I find your posts interesting, because aside from the gray
background, you haven't mentioned any "problems" with using
Wordpad. So do you really NEED MS Office? (OR Open Office)?

Anyway - I know you may believe you and everyone else involved
(and possibly everyone en Earth) will die horrible deaths if you
don't use MS Office, but have you considered /real/
alternatives:

http://xtort.net/freeware/office-and-productivity/floppy-office/

(the name of the page has not changed, but is now ***USB
office***...)

And, if you think bigger is better:

http://portableapps.com/

It appears any of the included programs can be downloaded
individually, the whole package IS big, and is certain to
contain some things you don't need.

It, among what seems hundreds of great apps (ALL FREE), includes
another Office suite if you have had bad experiences with OO -
LibreOffice. It also has several other separate wp, spreadsheet,
and presentation apps. And a whole bunch of other great stuff.

Here's a review of both suites:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/usb-office-showdown-tiny-usb-
office-vs-portable-apps/

P.S. If you save all your "wordy" stuff as TXT or RTF, virtually
any text/wp application can use them and convert them if they
need to look "spiffier" fo a particular purpose. (PDF is also a
good option.)

If you save all your "wordy/numbery" stuff as csv files, they
can be imported into anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values

Not to mention your files/backups will be about a hundred times
smaller.

 

[GlowingBlueMist]

Hello, a quick de lurk for an annoyance ...
Win7 Home premium 64bit ... now saving for new copy of Office (we have
Office XP, but want to upgrade).
Started using wordpad for small documents at the moment, but we get a
grey background printed on every document. Have tried printer
preferences, changing text colour, no joy.

Anyone have an idea ? ... have googled and found a few with the same
problem, but no real answers.

TIA

Try the following and see if it helps any.

Start the Notepad program from your Accessories folder.

Then do a file Save As to your desktop with the file name being WordPad.wri

Close Notepad

Then try double clicking on the saved file to open it.

If Windows complains it can not open it or the wrong program opens the
file, right click on it and choose properties. Then use the change
button where it says "Opens With" and tell it to open the file with WordPad.

Close everything you have opened and try double clicking on the document
and see if it now opens with Wordpad. With luck you can use that as
your default icon for Wordpad and your background color printing
problems are gone.

Just move the blank document icon you created in place of your old
WordPad icon and use that, provided the above fixed your problem.

 

[Ed Cryer]

Yep, tried notepad, its fine ... dug out some old documents - as long
as its wordpad, the problem persists.

We are at the point of using one suggestion found through searches ...
copy the XP version of wordpad onto the new Win7 machine ... not
really a fix, but until we can get our hands on new version of Office,
it may have to do ....

I've had this Win7 system about a year, but never used Wordpad before
this. And so I haven't altered any settings.

I printed with it; all fine, good white background.

So I then started investigating how's it interlocks with Win7. This is a
64-bit Win7, and there are two versions of wordpad.exe

"%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe"

Program Files ; 4,4768
Program Files (x86); 4,148
both (version 6.1, build 7601: SP1)

You need to get a clean version from MS. Do you have System Pack 1
installed?

Ed

 

[Ed Cryer]

I've had this Win7 system about a year, but never used Wordpad before
this. And so I haven't altered any settings.

I printed with it; all fine, good white background.

So I then started investigating how's it interlocks with Win7. This is a
64-bit Win7, and there are two versions of wordpad.exe

"%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe"

Program Files ; 4,4768
Program Files (x86); 4,148
both (version 6.1, build 7601: SP1)

You need to get a clean version from MS. Do you have System Pack 1
installed?

Ed

MS do, of course, keep clean versions of system files in Windows itself.
They're there for the eventuality of file corruption; and there's a
utility program to check and replace where needed.
SFC (sytem file checker);
http://tinyurl.com/3lxb3lq

I'd do just that, after first renaming the one or two versions of
wordpad.exe in Program Files & Program Files (x86) Xwordpad.exe.

Ed

 

[blues2use]

Hello, a quick de lurk for an annoyance ... Win7 Home premium 64bit ...
now saving for new copy of Office (we have Office XP, but want to
upgrade).
Started using wordpad for small documents at the moment, but we get a
grey background printed on every document. Have tried printer
preferences, changing text colour, no joy.

Anyone have an idea ? ... have googled and found a few with the same
problem, but no real answers.

TIA

I haven't used Wordpad or Notepad for a good while. I would suggest
downloading Notepad++, Notepad2 or TED Notepad. I have used all 3 without
any problems...

I'm not a shill...just a satisfied user of quality freeware...

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v5.9.3.html

http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

http://http://jsimlo.sk/notepad/

HTH

 

[karebai]

AbiWord is a good, free, word processing program and a small
download:
http://www.abisource.com/

Pete

Thanks ...on the list to try

 

[karebai]

IMHO MS don't /really/ think many people, if anyone, use either

Wordpad or Notepad (since they snare people by a free limited
time Office) so they haven't done much with them. The only thing
that has occurred to me is that the grey background is printing
because one of colors of your desktop scheme is automatically
adopted by Wordpad as the background color for WP printing.
Idiotic, but that's MS.

we tried that option, changed our grey back to white, rebooted didn't
work

But I find your posts interesting, because aside from the gray
background, you haven't mentioned any "problems" with using
Wordpad. So do you really NEED MS Office? (OR Open Office)?

Nope, no problems using Wordpad at all, only this printing annoyance

Anyway - I know you may believe you and everyone else involved
(and possibly everyone en Earth) will die horrible deaths if you
don't use MS Office, but have you considered /real/
alternatives:

Oh lord no, I've been using MS alternatives for ages (much to the
other half's concern, he hates loading up the system with extra
proggies).

http://xtort.net/freeware/office-and-productivity/floppy-office/

(the name of the page has not changed, but is now ***USB
office***...)

And, if you think bigger is better:

http://portableapps.com/

It appears any of the included programs can be downloaded
individually, the whole package IS big, and is certain to
contain some things you don't need.

It, among what seems hundreds of great apps (ALL FREE), includes
another Office suite if you have had bad experiences with OO -
LibreOffice. It also has several other separate wp, spreadsheet,
and presentation apps. And a whole bunch of other great stuff.

Here's a review of both suites:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/usb-office-showdown-tiny-usb-
office-vs-portable-apps/

P.S. If you save all your "wordy" stuff as TXT or RTF, virtually
any text/wp application can use them and convert them if they
need to look "spiffier" fo a particular purpose. (PDF is also a
good option.)

If you save all your "wordy/numbery" stuff as csv files, they
can be imported into anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values

Not to mention your files/backups will be about a hundred times
smaller.

Thanks for the extra suggestions, noted, and added to the list

 

[karebai]

Try this, open Internet Explorer, select File, Page Setup, and UNcheck
"print background colors and images".

Then go back, open Wordpad and try printing.

I use Firefox , but just in case, I fired up IE, went through the
options on page setup - the print background option was not checked.

Just to be sure I checked Firefox as well, same thing, print
background etc was not checked.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[karebai]

I've had this Win7 system about a year, but never used Wordpad before
this. And so I haven't altered any settings.

I printed with it; all fine, good white background.

So I then started investigating how's it interlocks with Win7. This is a
64-bit Win7, and there are two versions of wordpad.exe

"%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe"

Program Files ; 4,4768
Program Files (x86); 4,148
both (version 6.1, build 7601: SP1)

You need to get a clean version from MS. Do you have System Pack 1
installed?

Ed

We've only had Win 7 machine for 3 weeks ... first time we've used
wordpad in ages ... always used either Office(word) or notepad.
Service pack 1 installed.
Will try the clean version as the XP version we tried didn't work,
same printing problem.

 

[karebai]

MS do, of course, keep clean versions of system files in Windows itself.
They're there for the eventuality of file corruption; and there's a
utility program to check and replace where needed.
SFC (sytem file checker);
http://tinyurl.com/3lxb3lq

I'd do just that, after first renaming the one or two versions of
wordpad.exe in Program Files & Program Files (x86) Xwordpad.exe.

Ed

Will be trying this later in the day
Thank you

 

[karebai]

Not knowing anything about your printer this is a long shot...have you
checked the *printer* properties *from within Wordpad* to see if something
in the printer driver options been set to "print watermark" or "include
annoying background tint" or something simlar?

Joe Morris

No preference for watermarking, but we've changed every preference in
wordpad and the printer possible.

 

[karebai]

Try the following and see if it helps any.

Start the Notepad program from your Accessories folder.

Then do a file Save As to your desktop with the file name being WordPad.wri

Close Notepad

Then try double clicking on the saved file to open it.

If Windows complains it can not open it or the wrong program opens the
file, right click on it and choose properties. Then use the change
button where it says "Opens With" and tell it to open the file with WordPad.

Close everything you have opened and try double clicking on the document
and see if it now opens with Wordpad. With luck you can use that as
your default icon for Wordpad and your background color printing
problems are gone.

Just move the blank document icon you created in place of your old
WordPad icon and use that, provided the above fixed your problem.

Thanks ... another option to try later today ... will let you know how
it goes

 

[karebai]

I haven't used Wordpad or Notepad for a good while. I would suggest
downloading Notepad++, Notepad2 or TED Notepad. I have used all 3 without
any problems...

I'm not a shill...just a satisfied user of quality freeware...

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v5.9.3.html

http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

http://http://jsimlo.sk/notepad/

HTH

Thanks , we are exploring other programs in case we can't get it
working ... added to the list to check out