Textboxes & Custom Headers

Fanshawe OER Design Studio

Textboxes & Custom Headers

The Pressbooks textbox tool in the visual editor allows you to place text with frames to have it stand apart from the rest of the text in the body of your book. The structure and colour of textboxes may vary from theme to theme.

Pressbooks include six preset textbox styles. Each of these also features a ‘sidebar’ variation, which will display at 25% of the container width by default and was defined for PDF exports.

To add an empty textbox to your post from the visual editor, click on the Textboxes dropdown and select your desired textbox type. If you do this with a selected text already highlighted, this text will be placed within the newly created textbox.

Textbox Examples

Standard: This is a standard textbox.

Note: Standard and shaded text boxes were designed to include a single paragraph. If you’d like to have multiple line breaks within these text boxes, you can simply press “Shift+Enter” in the visual editor to create a ‘soft return’.

This will add line breaks without breaking the textbox (it’s what we did in this standard textbox, for example). If you feel confident in your ability to edit HTML tags, you can also switch to the Text Editor and edit a textbox’s <div> element directly.

Shaded: This is a shaded textbox.

Learning Objectives

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Key Takeaways

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Exercises

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Examples

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Sidebar Textboxes

Examples (Sidebar)

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All textboxes are available in the Textboxes drop-down list of the WYSIWYG toolbar is also available as sidebars. Here are characteristics to take note of:

The sidebar aligns to the right side of the page.
Text placed below the sidebar will wrap around the sidebar in the webbook and export formats.
The sidebar occupies 25% of the page width by default. You can change this setting with the Custom Styles feature. (See Custom Styles.)
This feature works best with the Open Textbook theme. (See Themes.)

If you want your book to have a Fanshawe look and feel, review the Fanshawe College brand guidelines

Textbox Colors

Each text box has a preset colour palette set by the book’s theme. Most themes include a Global Setting, which allows you to change the color scheme for the textbox types globally. We can change the textbox colours to match the theming of your book. Below is a sample of the textboxes included within Pressbooks.

Icons in Textboxes

You can add icons to your textboxes to help signify the box’s purpose to the reader. See some of the sample icons available in Standard Icons Sets. See some examples below.