Insert a picture as BACKGROUND or WATERMARK?

[Bald Tom]

w/ Windows XP & Word 2003. My goal is to create a flyer for a "4th of July"
party, with a faint/paled American flag BEHIND the text. With that said,
along with the last 4 hrs. of research, I'm thinking that: (1) I need to go
with BACKGROUND because WATERMARK will cause the flag to be mono-color. (2)
Though I want to specifically align certain lines of text over the red and
white strips, while avioding the blue field (seems that I read somewhere
today) that it's better to begin with the text, add the picture and then
reposition the words. Does this sound right?

"The Insertion Virgin"; Bald Tom

P.S. Any other hints, would be appreciated. Thanx

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm not sure why you think that a "watermark" would be monocolor. A
"background" won't print unless you specify it in Print Options.

But in your case, since you're dealing with a single page, a graphic
inserted Behind Text will do what you want (you'll need to use
"washout"--the same setting used for watermarks--for the color setting.
You'll need to diddle with the line spacing (or Space Before/After) on the
text to align it with the white stripes.

Alternatively, you could insert the graphic In Line With Text and use text
boxes (No Line, No Fill) to place text over it.

 

[Jay Freedman]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:02:01 -0700, Bald Tom <Bald

w/ Windows XP & Word 2003. My goal is to create a flyer for a "4th of July"
party, with a faint/paled American flag BEHIND the text. With that said,
along with the last 4 hrs. of research, I'm thinking that: (1) I need to go
with BACKGROUND because WATERMARK will cause the flag to be mono-color. (2)
Though I want to specifically align certain lines of text over the red and
white strips, while avioding the blue field (seems that I read somewhere
today) that it's better to begin with the text, add the picture and then
reposition the words. Does this sound right?

"The Insertion Virgin"; Bald Tom

P.S. Any other hints, would be appreciated. Thanx

I'll give you a "probably not" and a "maybe".

You can try setting the picture as a background, but try printing one copy
before you go any farther. And don't trust Print Preview; actually print it. You
may find that although Word shows a single large background picture, the printed
copy has a dozen or so smaller copies tiled over the page. I think it's a
printer driver bug, but it might be something else; anyway, it seems to be
fairly common, but it affects only backgrounds and not watermarks.

I don't believe your statement about "mono-color" is correct. The usual
watermark is given greater brightness and less contrast than the original
picture, but it's still in the original colors. Anyway, you can turn that off by
clearing the Washout check box in the Watermark dialog.

As far as whether it's better to put in the text before or after inserting the
picture, I don't think it really makes any difference. A hint, though: Display
the Forms toolbar and use the Frame button to create floating boxes that you can
type the text into and then position them. The frames are easier to deal with
than text boxes. For one thing, they default to being transparent -- though you
do have to right-click the frame's edge, click Borders & Shading, and choose no
border (which you also have to do for text boxes in the Format Text Box dialog).