Inconsistent appearance of white \hline on black background

Question

Are there known issues with the appearance of white text on black background?

When I use several \hline in a table I get different appearances for the lines. It could appear as normal or weak or entirely missing. Only when I magnify to about 400% do I see the lines consistently.

Assuming this is a hardware issue I tried on a different monitor and same thing showed up. I tried the booktabs package to get custom thickness for the lines but that package puts a band of space around its \hrule causing disconnected appearance if you have a vertical rule. (booktabs discourages vertical rules in a table.)

(Final Edit: I eventually agreed with booktabs, gave up on vertical rule, and got consistent looking white rules on black ground for a table.)

Sample code would be as in white text on black background in entire table:

\documentclass[11pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}
\usepackage{array}
\begin{document}
\begin{table}[H]
  \caption{Caption}
  \label{Table1}
  \begin{center}
    \arrayrulecolor{white}
    \newcolumntype{B}{>{\columncolor{black}\color{white}}c}
    \begin{tabular}{  B  l   | B  p{6in}   }
      \hline\hline
      Text 1 & Text 2 \\
      \hline\hline
      Text 3 & Text 4 \\
      \hline
    \end{tabular}
  \end{center}
\end{table}
\end{document}

Answer 1

I guess this comes from the fact that the black filling and the white lines are treated differently by the PDF reader, which assumes that the black filling is more important than the white lines, presumably treating the black filling similarly to how text would be treated usually.

When using TikZ to draw the table (based on TikZ matrix as a replacement for tabular), this problem doesn't appear. That approach takes more work (you'll have to set the column widths by hand), so it might well not be feasible for your needs, but if it's just for a simple table that needs to display well on screen at all zoom levels, it might do:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{matrix,positioning}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[
    table/.style={
        minimum height=1.5em,
        matrix of nodes,
        row sep=-\pgflinewidth,
        column sep=-\pgflinewidth,
        text depth=0.5ex,
        text height=2ex,
        nodes in empty cells
    }
]


\matrix [
    table,nodes={
        text width=0.5em,
        draw=white,
        text=white,
        fill=black
    },
    column 2/.style={nodes={text width=2em}},
    column 3/.style={nodes={text width=6em}},
    row 1/.style={nodes={text depth=2\baselineskip+0.5ex}},
    row 2/.style={nodes={text depth=\baselineskip+0.5ex}}
]
{
0   &ABC  & This is a long line that will wrap around \\
1   &DEF  & |[align=right]| Woo, right aligned! \\
2   &GHI  & 9 \\
};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}