Pages - A "dark mode" kludge

Dark-mode is messed up in Pages -- no question.

Apparently, for Apple, dark-mode is not just a "negative" of black on white -- as found on every other app in the world.

The mistake is clear when trying to move text around to other open windows, or when printing to a printer, or when even printing to PDF.

A white sheet of paper sent through my printer is now turned black by the toner ink! The TEXT is white!

Look, I like using pages to produce drafts. I like mac's spell-checker and dictionary lookup tool. I even let it read my writing back to me to aid in editing. But the facts are clear -- do not use the dark/black style sheet to compose!

When you set a Pages document background color, whether black or any other color, that is the background color of the saved Pages document, and every exported document including PDF and Word. If you are sharing documents with others, they may not appreciate your document color choices.

MS Word 16.76.1 is designed to adapt document background color to the operating system appearance mode. There are different settings in Word's settings : General to use dark or white page color when the operating system is set to Dark appearance mode. This is cosmetic only and dark pages are still saved as white.

If you read my post above before you used a black template background in Pages, there would have been no surprise as to the printed (or exported) outcome. Pages is simply not designed to emulate features in Word or LibreOffice Writer (as two examples) that allow optional dark page visuals, but white page output.

Using an optional black template, or making the page background black has nothing to do with the operating system "Dark mode." Pages would have to be written specifically to adapt to Dark mode and Apple has not thoroughly done that.