Formatting Block Quotes
It is standard formatting practice on web pages to indent largish chunks of quoted text. Sandvox does not currently provide a means to format text as a block quote. There is, however, a fairly easy workaround, similar to the one for inserting bullet points or tables.
In Word, or in another word processor capable of generating rich text, create a table with one row and two columns. Size the first column so that its width corresponds to the width of the indentation you desire. A value of .5 inches looks fairly natural. In the second column, type or paste the text you wish to quote. Copy the whole table and then paste it into Sandvox at the appropriate location. Voilá! A block quote.
Several things are worth noting:
- You must insert a carriage return after the table and copy the resulting empty line as well as the table. (To help you copy everything you need to copy, you may wish to turn on the formatting markers -- sometimes called "Invisibles" -- in your text editor.) Without that seemingly "extra" carriage return, your text in Sandvox will remain indented, and you will have no way of re-aligning it with the left side the web page you are editing.
- If you wish to add a block quote marker to the left of the indented text (typically a vertical line), you can easily do so, by adding a small graphic to the first column of the table. Just position in your cursor in the middle of the first column (cell) and draw a line the height of the table. Whether you can do this, of course, depends upon the drawing facilities of your text editor.
- Any borders that might appear when you create the table will not be copied over to Sandvox. In other words, you needn't worry about turning these borders off before copying and pasting your table.
