Text Formatting ⇒ How to save the current colour

[JustA_LaTeXusr]

If I want to gray out large swaths of text in a report, I know that I can use the xcolor package's \color{black!50} command:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... k-of-texts
http://alvinalexander.com/blog/post/lat ... -documents

Is there any way to confirm that the default color is indeed black before I issue the above command?

In a related search, I found that I can even push the current colour onto a stack:
http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/software/ ... lours.html

However, that page is from 1997, targets slides, and uses a different package. I am currently very bound to the color package.

This question has been posted at:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... ent-colour
http://latex-community.org/forum/viewto ... 44&t=25431

[Johannes_B]

Hi, you already got a pretty good answer by Heiko Oberdiek. I would stick to that.

To sum it up, use either groups (compatible with package color) or save the current color using the single dot:

Code: Select all

Code, edit and compile here:

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\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[x11names]{xcolor}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blindtext
\begingroup\color{Blue3} You can use groups to locally switch the
color \blindtext\endgroup
you can also save the current color, with a single dot. Just like
unix uses the single dot for the current directory. 
\colorlet{colorsave}{.}
\color{Brown4}\blindtext
and later restore the savedcolor \color{colorsave} \blindtext
\end{document}
 
 
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[JustA_LaTeXusr]

Thanks, Johannes. Interesting example you provided, educating me on the blindtext package.

[Johannes_B]

On the one side there are people saying this is lazyness, others called it efficiency. I think you need to be both to get the work done.