[mdawson]

I know exactly what you are talking about and that type of functionality is near exclusive to AutoCAD due to its lineage. Any other application has specifically colored text, typically black by default, but still user-definable, and therefore inverting the text color to contrast the background color is a huge GUI no-no; if I make text green, then it should not become purple, green's complimentary color, if I change from a white to a black background. AutoCAD predates the proliferation of GUI-based systems and was designed to work on dedicated workstations with displays that were monochromatic or had 8 to 16 colors. The last version of AutoCAD I used still had a user interface that still seemed a throwback back to that time excepting the clunky patched on Windows GUI and to the best of my knowledge AutoCAD is still not a pure GUI application.

Unless the user has no control over the color of text in an application, it is generally a bad idea to have the application adapt the color of objects within a document based on the background/canvas color. That point is even more true in any type of graphics-based design package where color selection is more critical to the final design; in the traditional application of CAD, color is of less importance for documents that will ultimately be printed as a monochromatic blueprint. The best you can hope for is that you can set the preferences for any given design software so that new documents open with a black background and white text by default.