I am laying out a book and looking to add a text box (right verbiage?) to emphasize a statement. In trying to do so, I noticed there is no option to add a text box. Another option I’ve tried is creating my own to add as an image.
Any direction is appreciated. Thanks!
Maybe this helps: Creating colored text blocks - #2 by kewms
I also would love to have Text Boxes. L&L are you listening? These are critical for distinguishing between the essential flow and important but supplementary information–in the published document. The footnote alternative is simply inferior, especially for paragraph-or-longer supplementary material.
Scrivener already has the necessary ingredients to mark text that should be formatted using fancier design tools, that it does not itself support in the editor or via compile settings. In short you are very rarely limited to what Scrivener itself can do in its necessarily simple text editor, thanks to its extensive and powerful style system:
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For ebooks: note there was some initial confusion as the OP was asking about “sidebar formatting”, but it was later confirmed they meant call-out boxes. Scroll down a bit to a follow-up post I made with an amended example projects that implements that design.
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For print: note this thread starts out with a conversation on using Scrivener’s more advanced compile mechanisms for sophisticated formatting, including LaTeX, but also encompasses conversion to other formats as well, such as ODT and DOCX. The post I linked to here though goes into how this should be done if you’re using Scrivener like a word processor instead of a Markdown editing platform.
- What that post doesn’t point out is that you needn’t modify your call-out box styles over and over, every time you compile. The preferred approach is the same you would use with Markdown generated word processing content, and is described in this post, in overview, with a link to more expanded instructions elsewhere.
- This much longer post goes into the advantages of LibreOffice over Word, as a complimentary tool with Scrivener, and how one can go from rough styled text to a nearly complete layout and design in a matter of seconds, after compiling.
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I just went through the tutorial project in which there are a lot of tips. These are presented using a paragrpah style that has a yellow background and a dashed border around it.
In my project, I want to replicate something similar but I can’t seem to find how to do so.
When you are creating or modifying a style, note the Highlight options in the bottom half of the window. This is something that needs to be optionally enabled, and once you do so you can then select a colour.
You may notice in practical usage that this works a bit more like a line highlighter than a box. We’re employing a little trick in the Windows tutorial, where this paragraph style has one tab stop at the very right edge of the editor. So on the last line we add a tab, which extends the highlight over and makes it look like a box. This is okay for something meant only to live within Scrivener; I wouldn’t want to do that for anything meant to export.
Lastly these are purely cosmetic, a writing tool if you will. They do not compile to formatting. However since you will be using styles to achieve them, it is pretty simple to add true box formatting to the styled text in a universal fashion, once compiled and opened in a tool that can do so.
The Mac tutorial uses a different method entirely, that will export, but the result is a bit sub-optimal in that it is a single-cell table. Tables aren’t strictly speaking meant to make boxes like this, and won’t always work the way you want depending on the output type—but some do consider it a valid approach. I would myself prefer to use styles and real boxes though (along with a template that has all of my styles formatted the way I want).
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So the best practice is not to worry about the layout of the boxes, but rather have a style assigned to it so I can then later update the style in something like Word?
If you are using Word, then yes. Scroll up to see a list of previous discussions on the matter, which branches out into further discussion than that, such as ePub and other typesetting options.
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