The Irish are talking about ‘pink text’ used in a court ordered apology. Text that’s so faint it’s almost impossible to read. Here’s how to do it and post on a web site.
TheLiberal.ie site was ordered to apologize for copyright breaches and did it by posting an image of the required text in light pink text that’s barely readable.
Later in the day, the text was made a little more readable (right) but still as an image so it could not be searched for.
Do you admire the creativity and attention seeking or disapprove the contempt of court and the rule of law?
There’s two tricks here. Making the text very faint and making a screen image of a document. Here’s how to do it in Microsoft Word.
Faint Text
Select the text and use the basic Word color selector on the Home tab. It doesn’t have many faint text options so you must dig a little deeper under More Colors …
The standard color tab gives a wider selection, just click on a hexagon.
The fine detail color selection is on the Custom tab. Choose the color from the main selection box then the dark/light from the right-hand slider.
Once you’ve selected a color, they’ll appear in the Recent Colors section of the main color selector.
Here’s how some faint text can look.
Text to Image
Now you have the text in a different color, how do you make an image of it?
There are many, many ways to get a screen-shot of any screen part. Windows has shortcuts to do it plus additional ‘snipping’ accessories. Office itself has Insert | Screenshot.
If the available windows aren’t right, choose ‘Screen Clipping’ to select a custom part of the screen.
Whichever tool works you, get an image of the text to paste to a web page or other document. You can use the standard Office image tools (e.g. Crop) to edit the image.
