Text Editor Capabilities - Pull-Out Quote

By Bob Stephen

One of the less obvious text modifiers in the editor dropdown list (click on the arrow in its top left window to see the list) is "Paragraph as pull-out quotes". 

What this does is apply a pull-out quote effect to an entire paragraph. You do not have to select any text, although you could, and wherever you are in the paragraph or whatever you have selected the effect will be applied to the entire paragraph. So just click anywhere in the target paragraph to anchor the cursor there. Then apply the effect.

The effect consists of drastically narrowing the paragraph text, pushing it to the extreme right of the screen and then sliding it partly down the right hand side of the paragraph that follows.

Here is an example.

Para 1 ... This text was typed as a normal paragraph and then the pull-out quote effect was applied to it AFTER Para 2 was typed.

Para 2 ... This paragraph was typed after Para 1, with the intention to send Para 1 down the right hand side as a pull-out quote. Just like this !. There is little you can do to alter the effect. Para 1 always aligns near the top of Para 2, however long or short it is.

If you like living dangerously then you could do things in the reverse order. First you could make the pull-out and then type text to its left. Here goes ... start by reading the pull-out text then finish by reading the left hand text. If you are editing similar text and want to go down through it this is also the order the cursor will take as you click the arrow keys. Beware !

Or you could as the FIRST step apply the effect to an isolated paragraph and this is what will happen.

THEN you could try to find this place to the left of the pull-out and type in some text. However, I would be strongly inclined to adopt the first approach above as the editor is most unfriendly if you find yourself trying to type in the wrong place and unless you can cure the problems that happen by editing the HTML you will be hopelessly lost !

This effect, like centred tables, is not for newbees to the site or for the faint hearted !!

Because of the title "Pull-out quote" (which is strongly suggestive of how Community Sites envisaged it be used) and the impossibility of having proper positional control over the effect it is suggested it be used purely as a quote of short extracts of material in the article. In other words a short ellipsis type quote of extracts from the text and not a paragraph of the text itself.