Quark Forums

I sometimes work on minutes for committee meetings, and these often involve an extra column in the right-hand margin of each page which shows who is responsible for carrying out a particular action, or at other times there are reference numbers or notes in that area which apply to the text in the adjoining paragraph or clause.

Currently I have to manually position these within a separate text box, and if the main text is edited I have to move them up or down to keep them in the correct positions.

I'm looking for an Xtension that will enable me to place a marker in the body of the text which will determine the position of the name or reference, so that if the main text reflows the name or reference will follow it, always staying exactly opposite my marker position.

Does anybody know of anything like that?

Sorry if you've already tried this, but what about anchoring the text box next to the copy it's supposed to follow?

You can anchor text boxes into text boxes as well as picture boxes into text boxes....

I would try it, but the references have to be to the right of the main body of text, effectively in the right-hand margin, so I can't see how that would work.

Here's how I'd do it.

Make the text box that has the copy wide enough to cover both the width of the original copy taxt box, plus the text box for the notes in the margin.

Set a paragraph style sheet for the copy with a right hand indent that limits it's width to the size of the original text box.

Make a box for your notes at the size of the original margins (or maybe slightly smaller), apply your runaround (0,0,0,0).

Set a paragraph style sheet for the copy that get's these notes. Use soft returns to advance the copy down where it goes over the indent margin of the previous copy style sheet. Set a tab on the first line of this style sheet that starts where the coordinates of the original margin start.

With the Item tool, cut the box that has your notes. Select the content tool and then go back to the tab you just made. Place the cursor to the right of the tab and paste.

Now you've got notes that follow your copy.

This isn't perfect as I don't have a real good idea of your exact layout, but hopefully it might work for you.

Thanks Erik,

Before I try that I thought I should add a URL to a screen shot of a page I've just created to show you exactly what I mean. The names on the right need to be exactly opposite the text referring to them, so if a line or more is added to Paragraph 1, the names on the right would move down the page with the text to their left:

http://www.indent.ltd.uk/public/MinuteSample.jpg
If you still think your method will achieve this, then I'll try it.

I see now. You actually then, would not need anchored text boxes. Just make one text box, set indents, use a tab on the line that references the note and then type in the note. Then just use soft returns.

Which is maybe what you are doing already?

The problem with this is that you'd have to move the notes manually anytime the refernce changed to a different line, which is why you were asking about keeping it to together here.

I don't know of any way to do that, even with anchorded text boxes.

I think it's a tough one for Quark to do this automatically, but MS Word does it using Tables which happily flow from page to page. I'm almost tempted to do it in Word and go straight to PDF from that, but a Quark Xtension would be the ideal solution.

I knew I had done this before and just had to test it to see how i'd done it.

Put a right tab in the subhead line, insert a hanging text box (align with text ascent) with the name in it.

Give the hanging text box a left run around (or indent) and pull down to the length of the copy paragraph below.

Either add a baseline shift to the name style or a baseline start to the hanging text box to get the copy to align with the adjacent copy.

All you really need to at that point is adjust the height of the hanging text box to whatever length you need. I would style the copy so it doesn't break paragraphs.

I did find the insert of the text box a little flakey, sometimes I had to pull it up to 1 line and let it refresh and then pull it down but no big deal.

You could also do it with tables but that would likely take longer. I haven't really explored that. I don't think we have powerful enough formatting capability there yet. If i'm wrong someone let me know. I think I could format the most detailed tables faster in Q than someone using tables in ID, although you'd might not be able to convince them of that.