Andy Smith wrote:
OK, there are all kinds of workarounds -- including the very sloppy one
involving the white rectangle -- what if your publication's paper isn't
necessarily white, or of one color?

Printers can't print white, so it doesn't matter what colour or pattern
the paper is - printing white simply prints nothing. (At least as far as
Publisher is concerned - some dye-sub printers can print white, but if
you tell Publisher to print white, even they will print nothing, since
in Publisher, "white = nothing".)

Of course, if the Master Page has colours or patterns on, then that's
different - but that was even the advice offered by the Help File back
in the day. I guess the recommendation was then to white out the entire
Master Page and copy and paste it on top of the white rectangle,
removing unwanted elements.

Fine, I can work around it, but I also want to report this *BUG* for
the benefit of others doing more serious work -- that's what a bug report is
for, and that's why I wrote the subject line as such.

This newsgroup is for support and help doing what you need to do, not
for reporting bugs. The individuals here are simply trying to help you
do what you need to do.

I can't believe it's so hard to report bugs to Microsoft,

If Microsoft opened their bug reporting channels to the world and his
wife, the vast majority of "bug"s would in fact be user error, and the
real bugs would be practically impossible to distinguish without
devoting a huge support staff to filtering through them.

--
Ed Bennett