Talk:Block quotation

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Your last formatting doesn't preserve the indentation of the first or second lines of the paragraphs, which is why I included them in the first place. Every single example I included is a little different. Each has slighly different indentation and after-header spacing. I did this to illustrate the myriad of ways such blocks can be styled. This includes the last paragraph. Also, I don't think that the frames look much worse than the format you have proposed, and they are the standard way on Wikipedia (and many professional sites) to set off excerpts that are so different from the surrounding text. --Primetime 22:52, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Regardless, the boxes look absolutely god-awful. I'll mess with it later tonight and see if I can address the issue you raised, but those boxes have got to go. ⇒ BRossow ^T/_C 22:55, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

In any case, I think both layouts look less than pleasant. Are you familiar with HTML? The reason I ask is that we could try a table layout something like this:

Fielding hides his own opinions on the matter deep in Tom Jones:

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and

have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are. From this

complaisance the critics have been emboldened to assume a dictatorial power, and

have so far succeeded that they are now become the masters, and have the assurance

to give laws to those authors from whose predecessors they originally received them.

I'm no programmer, so I'm unsure how to reduce the vertical spacing between rows. If you think that something like this would look OK and you're unsure how to reduce the spacing yourself, perhaps I could leave a note at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)?

I'm very familiar with HTML. I'll take a stab at it later tonight when I have time (i.e. after the kids are in bed). --BRossow 00:24, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Kids asleep yet? <g> In addition to making a couple of textual changes (see below), I took a stab at formatting the examples using the table suggestion above in combination with the Wiki <blockquote> command and a couple of other tricks. (I achieved the one-em indentations by using an em-dash glyph and setting it in the same color as the background. It's a bit of a kludge, but it seems to work.)

As to the textual changes I made: I think you'll find that extracts/long/block quotations are a type of direct (i.e., verbatim) quotation, not indirect quotation. What *is* an indirect quotation, anyway? Perhaps someone meant indirect discourse, which is when someone's words are paraphrased rather than directly quoted. Further, someone referred to run-in quotations and in-line; this could just be my ignorance acting up again, but I've never seen in-line quotation (Chicago Manual of Style and a couple of other style manuals I have called them run in quotes too) and was wondering if someone had used in-line quotation by extension of in-line graphic or some similar term. Anyway, HTH. Jim_Lockhart 11:47, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

This gray box should be templatized. There are many instance where you want to show a visual formatting example like this, where it needs to be set apart from the text, but isn't really a blockquote in the normal sense. — Omegatron 00:07, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reduce the how-to material

This article has a lot of poorly-cited information that would be more appropriate for a how-to book than an encyclopedia. Is there any objection to eliminating most of the examples, and merely writing about the style manuals, instead of repeating all of their prescriptions? —Michael Z. 2007-08-27 21:38 Z