How to change the background color only for the current page?

Question

How can I change the background color only for the current page? I found that I can change the color with \pagecolor{color} but that unfortunately changes the color for all pages after this command. Any ideas how to limit this command only to the current page?

Answer 1

You could use the \afterpage command from the afterpage package to change the color back.

Here's an example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}% for auto generating text
\usepackage{afterpage}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-12]
\pagecolor{yellow}\afterpage{\nopagecolor}
\lipsum[22-30]
\end{document}

Answer 2

To circumvent the issue of \nopagecolor being only available for pdfTeX and LuaTeX, you could use the pagecolor package and \newpagecolor{yellow} to set the new page color and \restorepagecolor to restore the pagecolor to the one it was before \newpagecolor{yellow} was used. If that color was white, it is white again, if it was none, it is none again, and if it was e.g. green, it is green again. To make the switch back to the old page colour automatically, \afterpage as suggested by frabjous can be used.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}% for auto generating text
\usepackage{afterpage}% for "\afterpage"
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{pagecolor}% With option pagecolor={somecolor or none}
% you can set a page colour here.
% "none" is the default, but if \nopagecolor is not available, "white" will be used.
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-12]
\newpagecolor{yellow}\afterpage{\restorepagecolor}
\lipsum[22-30]
\end{document}