To add background themes to text documents, you’ll need a text editor that has theme options. Forget about MS Word, and almost any other alternative package, and add Qute to your desktop or laptop. Qute is a freeware word processor that adds themed backgrounds to documents.

You can add Qute to the Windows, Mac OS X or Linux platforms. Open this page and click on Windows, Mac OX or Linux to save the Zip file. Next, right-click on the Zip file, select Extract All and choose a location for the extracted folder. Open the extracted folder, and click Qute.exe to launch the software’s window below.

By default, the software already has the Subtle Dark theme selected. You can choose alternative themes by clicking the Q at the top left corner of the window to open the software’s menu. Then select CONFIG and THEMES from the menu. That will open the menu in the shot below.

From there you can choose a few alternative background themes. For example, select the Wood theme to add a wooden background to the document as in the shot below.

To save the documents, click the Q button and select SAVE FILE. Then choose a folder to save it in. Whilst you can reopen the documents in other word processors, they’ll open as blank pages without the theme. You can open txt documents in Qute, which is one of the supported file formats.

To print the document, and select other publishing options, click Q and click PUBLISH to open the menu below. There you can select to print the document, and can export it to PDF via Latex. Note that Pandoc is required to export documents as PDFs.

As Qute has relatively minimal options it’s not a great word processor. Nevertheless, the software’s themes are a novelty that you won’t find with other alternative packages. For further details, check out the Qute blog here.