Things to Keep in Mind When Using Textboxes
- Too many textboxes can be visually disruptive and impede reading comprehension by making it more difficult for readers to get into the reading flow. Keeping the number to 4–6 per chapter at most is strongly recommended. This also makes things much easier for our production colleagues.
- Stacked boxes don’t present well visually. If at all possible, there should never be more than one textbox on a page. Ideally, textboxes will be dispersed throughout the chapter with plenty of text in between.
- Textboxes with the same purpose should always have the same general heading.
- Authors often confuse textboxes (which are presented in the main body of the content) with sidebars or marginalia (which appear in the margins). For reasons of accessibility, we no longer recommend sidebars.
- It’s best not to stuff the boxes with too much content. If a typeset page averages 400 words, a textbox should have fewer words than that. There will always be exceptions, but this is a good general rule. A production editor can advise if an author wants to distinguish some aspect of the content, but a textbox is not well-suited to their purpose.