14

In newspaper and magazine articles, striking messages from the main text are often highlighted in form of quotes in larger font size, sometimes also set apart by a bold rule or so. For an article I am composing, I would like to do the same.

Can you recommend any aesthetically pleasing method to do so?

lockstep
  • 250,273
Ingo
  • 20,035

1 Answers1

16

Here is one attempt at typesetting "emphasized quotes" within a document.

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\usepackage{xcolor}% http://ctan.org/pkg/xcolor
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\usepackage{multicol}% http://ctan.org/pkg/multicol
\newcommand{\myquote}[2][black!10]{%
  \medskip
  {\setlength{\fboxsep}{.1\columnwidth}%
  \noindent\colorbox{#1}{\begin{minipage}{\dimexpr\columnwidth-2\fboxsep}
    \raggedright\sffamily\bfseries\Huge#2
  \end{minipage}}} \par
  \medskip
}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{3}
  \lipsum[1]
  \myquote{``This is a very important quote''}
  \lipsum[2-5]
  \myquote[orange!30]{``\ldots and here is another.''}
  \lipsum[6-9]
\end{multicols}
\end{document}

Since you reference newspaper or magazine as the source, multicol provides an easy-to-use columnar presentation. geometry was used to increase the page footprint (setting the text block margins to 1in), while lipsum provided some dummy text.

The idea behind \myquote[<color>]{<text>} is to typeset the quote using a bunch of predefined font selections: \raggedright\sffamily\bfseries\Huge, all of which is mean to make them stand out from the regular text in terms of font size, type, family and alignment. The default background colour is 10% black (black!10, provided by xcolor), but you can change this to suit your document colours.

Of course, other "magic" can also be added to the formatting as defaults that are modifiable, if needed.

Werner
  • 603,163