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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Thu 26 Oct 2006, 11:29 AM
I must admit, I have blockquote envy, and one of these days (soon), I'll have to get around to dealing with it.  When I post a quote, it looks like this:
This is a boring, but fairly default, blockquote which is indented, has a single vertical line and italics, but not much else to distinguish it.

If I go over to Rob Weir's excellent blog, I see that he has a blockquote that looks much better:
Now here is a quote with quote marks (and indentation and smaller text and a different color).  Sheesh, no wonder I feel inadequate.  This is a great look, although it seems better suited to a literary kind of quote.

If I wander over to Philip Storry's site, I see that he has something just a bit different, but not so extreme:
This would give a bit more sense of separation with slightly different color and thicker bar, but without the image.

Over at Bob Sutor's site, there is this style:
This sets off nicely against Bob's colored background, but may not look so great here.

So, what should I use?  The nice thing is, by just setting the style parameter, I could add all of these, so I could easily add my own:
But, I would have to avoid getting weird and garish.

What kind of block quotes would you like to see here (or on your own site?

Copyright © 2006 Genii Software Ltd.

Thu 26 Oct 2006, 09:32 AM
Show and Tell Thursday logoOne of the most difficult issues I have with Show and Tell Thursday posts, and actually with lots of other posts on this blog, is that I don't know what people don't know.  I'll casually mention some technique, and people will say they have never heard of it, but I'll mention something else I think is cool and new and people will ask how anybody could not know that.  So, in the absence of any clue whether my readers know about this or not, I'm going to re-post this answer I put on the Notes Net forum (I know, I know, but I still have a Notes.Net mug in my hand, so I still get to call it Notes Net).

The problem is how to center text or other content both vertically and horizontally  in a frame or box of set height and width.  When I refer to a box, it could be anything.  For example, you could put this on a layer to ensure a particular size  It is relatively easy to center content horizontally using the paragraph alignment, but centering vertically is a bit harder.  The following will work for the Notes client and for the web.  Create a one cell table (one row and one column) with either a fit to window width for a frame or a fixed width of the size of your box, into which your content will go.  After setting it up as described below, you will probably want to turn off the borders.  I am assuming a one inch high frame or box, but you should adjust the height to the height of your frame or box.  I have set up such a table with a width of 5 inches and a height of 1 inch.  Below that are the steps to set it up.
If you have a one cell table, just set the paragraph to center horizontally and the table cell to center vertically, then set the height for both Notes client and web.  Like the table below (except that you will set your row height to the height of the frame and turn off the borders):

The content I want centered

First, set the text to centered:
Paragraph alignment centered.

Second, set the table to vertically align and have a minimum row height (for Notes client):
Table cell width, alignment and minimum row height

Third, set the HTML CSS style for the table cell to a row height, since the Notes client setting doesn't seem to translate to HTML properly.
HTML settings for height

And there you have it.  Centered content in the Notes client or on a web.

Please do let me know if you would like to see more of this sort of tip or more complex stuff with layers or more basic stuff such as how to make thin borders on my tables for the web.

Copyright © 2006 Genii Software Ltd.

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