Re: Sidebars and versals Oh my!

[John Culleton <john@wexfordpress.com>]

On Monday 27 December 2004 06:33, Adam Lindsay wrote:

> plus-rul is interesting, but I'm 98% certain that when John talks about
> sidebars, he means what you call intermezzos. My interpretation, using
> the things I do know (or figured out this morning):
>
> \setupfloat [intermezzo]
>    [leftmargindistance=-\outercombitotal,
>     rightmargindistance=-\outercombitotal,
>     default=outer]
> \setupcaption[intermezzo][location=none]
> \starttext
> \showframe
> \input ward
> \placeintermezzo{}{\framedtext[width=7cm]{\tfx\input dawkins }}
> \dorecurse{3}{\input knuth \par}
> \stoptext
>
> What I don't know, however, is: 1) how to force a width on flowed text
> within a float without resorting to the internal \framedtext, or 2) how
> to use this with \splitfloat, which is what I suspect people who think
> about sidebars (intermezzo texts) are going to be worried about in a
> batch-based system.

For my applications I don't need a lengthy sidebar that will overflow to 
another page.

I ran Adam's code as is and noted with interest the results. Then I added the 
gray background, rounded corners etc.  Some things are still problems.

1. Two words in the main text (both "influenced")  actually intrude into the 
sidebar. 

1a. One word in the sidebar ("influencing") overflows the dimensions of the 
background. (but see 3 below.)

2. If I specify a background screen and a frame with rounded corners the 
background remains rectangular and does not round to match the frame.

3. If I specify frame=overlay then the text of the sidebar no longer overflows 
the background but the sidebar text goes out to the very edge of the 
background.    Better to just add a hyphen to the single word. I may play 
with "offset=" or with the TeX \tolerance parameter. 

4. The sidebar in the original test example goes out almost to the very edge 
of the paper. Printers don't like this :-) I will play with page layout 
dimensions a bit to see if I can fix this. 

Here is my current version:

----------------------------
\setupfloat [intermezzo] 
   [leftmargindistance=-\outercombitotal,
    rightmargindistance=-\outercombitotal,
    default=outer]
\setupcaption[intermezzo][location=none]
\setupcolors[state=start]
\starttext
\showframe
\input ward
\placeintermezzo{}
{\framedtext[width=7cm,frame=on,framecorner=round,frameradius=6pt,
%framecolor=gray,
background=screen,backgroundscreen=.7]{\tfx\input dawkins }}
\dorecurse{3}{\input knuth \par}
\stoptext

--------------------------
-- 
John Culleton

Short list of publishing/marketing books:
http://wexfordpress.com/tex/shortlist.pdf