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Colored Bar Paper Colors

Introduction

Recently I created an article titled Retro Monochrome and High Contrast Color Display Palettes. That article deals with colors that are used when having bright text on dark backgrounds. In this article I feature colors to be used as light background colors with dark (usually black) foreground text on top.

Up until the late 1990s it was common to see continuous form tractor-feed paper, for use with computer printers, with colored bars on it that facilitated easy following of lines of text across the width of the printed page. Generally, it was common to see green bar paper and blue bar paper available for purchase. There may have been other colors, but not widely sold. The exact shade of color (blue or green) was not standardized and I believe was left up to the paper manufacturer to determine.

This page has simulations of colored bar papers which are not meant to mislead you into thinking they are real images. They are just here to illustrate what real colored bar papers would look like in various different colors.

Some of these colors were sampled from images of real paper. I also recorded some of these from simulations I found in the past while visiting web pages or using software. Others are numerically created by hand, such as #CCFFCC which is an ideal number, as opposed to something like #CDFECB which would likely be sampled from an image.

Most of these color names are general and not to be considered as specific to the exact color shown.

This page does not have an exhaustive collection of colors. It features only 25 different color examples. One of those should be sufficient to satisfy your needs. Many other suitable colors can be found by searching for "pastel colors" on the web.

When configuring software on modern PCs (such as your text editor, email client, etc.) you can use these colors as background colors with black foreground text to only 50% mimic the colored bar papers shown below. This is because you are not able to configure software to have a background color from below bar and then alternate with a background white bar. That means you are just left with a solid non-alternating background.

When creating web pages (in HTML, CSS, etc.), word processing documents, or other types of documents (graphics) that have black foreground text information, you can have a background color from below bar alternate with a background white bar to 100% mimic the green bar paper style of presentation. Note that the alternating of a background color from below bar with a background white bar is usually done in groups of three lines of text in each bar, repeat that as necessary to the end of the document.

The colors are represented as hexadecimal (hex) triplet 24-bit RGB values (#RRGGBB).

Enjoy!

The Colored Bar Paper Samples:

Green Bar: #A9D0BE

Green Bar: #A0E0A0

Green Bar: #B0FFB0

Green Bar: #BBEABB

Green Bar: #CCFFCC

Green Bar: #D0F0D0

Green Bar: #D3FFD3

Green Bar: #D4E2D4

Blue Bar: #C8E0FF

Blue Bar: #D7E2FF

Blue Bar: #BEFFFB

Blue Bar: #CCFFFF

Lavender Blue or Periwinkle Bar: #CCCCFF

Pale Goldenrod Bar: #EEE8AA

Light Goldenrod Yellow Bar: #FAFAD2

Yellow Bar: #FFF0BE

Yellow Bar: #FFFFA6

Yellow Bar: #FFFFCC

Buff Bar: #F0DC82

Red (Pink) Bar: #FFC0CB

Red Bar: #FFCCCC

Magenta (Fuchsia) Bar: #FFCCFF

Gray Bar: #DDDDDD

Gray Bar: #E0E0E0

Gray Bar: #E5E5E5

Credits

I would like to thank David J. Gesswein for his Green Bar Paper Information page which has interesting information on green bar paper and which taught me, over 20 years ago, how to produce an HTML table that simulates green bar paper.

Changelog

## 2025-03-20 ##################################################################

Reworked the paragraph that starts off with "When configuring software on modern PCs" into two clearer paragraphs.

## 2025-03-18 ##################################################################

## Original posting date.

    (This document was originally published here: https://MW.Rat.bz/barpaper )
                       Counter:  1960  (Since 2025-03-18)
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