Not to put too fine a point on it, but the color 8 in PDCurses, by default, is the same as A_BLACK | A_BOLD (as a foreground color -- it'd be A_BLACK | A_BLINK as a background color). This goes back to the behavior of ancient PC video cards in text mode. You can decouple the colors from the A_BOLD attribute by calling "PDC_set_bold(TRUE)"; however, in that case, you still wouldn't get light black from the above code. Can you see why?