Can you make MS Word display a black background with white text, but print the inverse?
For Word 2013, the easiest method that I know of is:
- Choose Design on the Ribbon
- On the far right end of the Ribbon, select Page Color. If you don't see it, you may need to expand the Ribbon to show all commands.
- Choose your desired page color. If you choose black, Word will automatically display your text in white.
To make the color settings persistent, click Set As Default just to the left of the Page Color button.
On the ribbon go to "Page Layout" and then "Page Color" - select black Then on the font styles you are using, change the color to white. There's probably a way you can set this up as a default template if you want it for every document. Not sure if it will try to print it this way or not. It's not too hard to switch it all back before you print though. (revert the page background, and select all; change font color)
You could use HTML instead of word documents.
Not only is it a standard and easily viewed, but you can actually define different stylesheet for screen and printer.
Depending on your needs, you can knit the markup by hand or customize TinyMCE for your needs.
Or, as is quite common, you could use a wiki system to write your documentation, which would also give you all the features of a wiki (versioning, linking, searching, tagging etc.).