If you set a printer to print white text, does it use ink?

Factual Questions
1

Originally, I was going to add “…on white paper”, but other than size, I don’t think your common desktop printers can recognize paper color

And how would a printer cartridge printer white text when it has black, magenta, cyan, and yellow ink?

To be clear, I’m not saying that you draw a black box in MS Paint or something with white text. Clearly, the printer would just print the box and omit the ink that makes up the text. But I don’t have any non-white paper with me at the moment so I cannot test if a printer can actually print out white-colored text on colored paper

2

Common inkjet or laser printers would, as you say, just print it as “negative space”.

Commercial print shops, offset or silk screen for example, would use white ink.

3

A standard inkjet printer can’t print in white. The inks are dyes and are not opaque. There are specialty printers that can do it, but AFAIK nobody makes a white ink cartridge for a standard inkjet.

4

Yeah, white is generally the color of the paper. If you want actual white printing on a colored piece of stock you need to run it as a spot color, which adds cost.

At the printshop where I used to be the design manager we had a small two color press on site and would run spot color jobs as needed, and we once ran a two color white and silver design on black cardstock. It looked okay, but the only reason we did it was to use that particular paper.