Printing of background colors

Hope someone can help a newbie with this:
My client has a template for a certificate, with <td bgcolor="#xxxxxx"> for headers in different areas of the certificate. It's read into a perl script, substituting values throughout the certificate, and looks good when displayed on the screen in both Netscape and IE. However, we have a print button on the page so people can print their certificates - and it doesn't print the color in the cells, so it looks pretty boring when printed out. (The newbie in me didn't realize you couldn't print the colors in table cells).
Does anyone have a solution for this? Would a colored image solve the problem? And if so, how do I get the image to span across the <td> when I'm using % sizing, not pixels?

Hope this makes sense!

Only thing I can tell you is that what you see is different from what you print. The monitor is all RGB mode, but all printers or any printing machines are CMYK mode. Even if you use very expensive printer, it doesn't matter. First you will have to scan actual certificate in print and bring it to Photoshop, change the mode to CMYK and use colorpicker.(or was it called eye dropper or something?) After that, you will click the foreground square box at the bottom of tool bar and see the persentage of C, M, Y, K & R, G and B. If you get each persentage, you will next have to match them to Web colors in Photoshop or similar raster image program. Another program it might be helpful for this is Adobe Imageready. Once you pick the specific color in this program, it will tell you the web color code in one of the windows. The thing about this problem is just the way of matching colors, but basically what you see and what you print are not going to be the same. (it sometimes looks the same, but it's actually not!) So... Just figure out the closest colors to each other (Web and CMYK) and keep printing out until you get the colors you want. I know colors are sometimes very complex, but you will be able to solve this kind of problem simply by using color picker and color pallet in raster image programs like Adobe Photoshop. Try this and if there's any other problems regarding to this kind of topic, please reply this message.

[This message has been edited by milk7 (edited November 10, 2000).]