What is the difference between "none" and "white" on package pagecolor?

Question

The title pretty much says it all. pagecolor seems to treat the options white and none differently, in particular because none doesn't work with package crop. What would be the reasons to use none instead of white and vice-versa? Will any of them lead to a larger pdf or to differences when printing?

Answer 1

Description

• pagecolor=none is the default, and it means, there is no background (can be thought of as transparent background)
• pagecolor=white explicitly sets the background color to white

You can see the difference, if you insert the resulting PDFs to another document, with a non-standard background color. In the example below, I inserted pagecolor_white.pdf and pagecolor_none.pdf to a document with yellow background.

A normal use case for this are beamer presentations with a background color other than white, where you want to insert PDFs with transparent background or explicitly need the white background.

Regarding the file size, it can be expected, that a PDF with specific background color is minimal but negligibly (~ 1 KB) larger than a PDF with pagecolor=none (or without the pagecolor package).

Result

Code

pagecolor_white.tex

\documentclass[margin=2mm]{standalone}
\usepackage[pagecolor=white]{pagecolor}

\begin{document}
    \huge\verb|pagecolor=white|
\end{document}

pagecolor_none.tex

\documentclass[margin=2mm]{standalone}
\usepackage[pagecolor=none]{pagecolor} % As `none` is the default, you don't realy need this package here.

\begin{document}
    \huge\verb|pagecolor=none|
\end{document}

pagecolor.tex

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[pagecolor=yellow]{pagecolor}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}
\includegraphics[height=20mm]{pagecolor_white}

\includegraphics[height=20mm]{pagecolor_none}
\end{document}