On Friday 18 May 2007 08:07, Helge Hafting wrote: > Steve Litt wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > All my books contain, interspersed throughout regular text, boxes > > breaking out special stuff. The boxes are centered and have slightly > > narrower margins than the rest of the text. Each box has a large box > > title on the top line, and the text of the message to the reader in the > > rest of the box. Titles are often things like NOTE, TIP, WARNING, > > CAUTION, but often are completely ad-hock text, which is why I can't > > simply create an environment for each. > > Well - do you need latex code at all? LyX supports boxes > directly, and you can use a normal heading inside the box. > The box can of course be centered. > > Or do you need something that insert->box don't offer?
Thanks Helge, I didn't even know Insert->box existed. That's gonna save me a lot of time on shorter documents. Now to answer your question... My box has all these features that Insert->box doesn't give you (natively): * Narrower text width than body text * A background color * A large, bold, centered title * Different formatting for the box text (in this case ragged right) One could probably fine tune all that each time, but... Or one could make environments for the title and text, but then why not just have those two environments do the whole job. Also, from a conceptual viewpoint, any time you have type of content that serves a special purpose, you should probably have a style for that type of content so that, in the future, if you want to change the appearance of every occurrence of that type of content, you just change your layout. On that subject, the "working version", of those environments, which I used in first-drafting the book, didn't use a minipage -- it just narrowed the text and put lines above and below the "box". I wrote the book like that, and then at the last minute, took the time to convert the style to print in a shaded minipage, and all my boxes became shaded and quit page breaking at bad places. Thanks SteveT Steve Litt Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware http://www.troubleshooters.com/
