[texhax] multipage framed boxes?

[Morten Høgholm]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 16:59:22 +0200, Yuri Robbers <yuri at deavolente.org>  
wrote:

>
> Hello all,
>
> in a book I am currently working on, I use occasional intermezzos,
> which, according to the publisher's instructions, ought to be framed in
> boxes and/or set on a light grey background. Of course this is easily
> accomplished by putting the intermezzo in a standard \fbox. The problem,
> however, is that some of my intermezzos are longer than a page, in which
> case \fboxes don't work.
>
> I tried solving the problem using the various multipage equivalents of
> the tabular envrionment, but that did not work (so far).
>
> Several TeX-wizards have told me this is impossible, yet I refuse to
> believe them, especially since I have seen these and similar tricks
> being used in many TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt documents. The multipage box with
> grey background is a standard function in ConTeXt, so I think it should
> be possible to implement it in LaTeX as well. Also, I have seen a pdf of
> a "Beginner's LaTeX" document, which itself is written in LaTeX that
> employs framed boxes that start on one page and end on another very
> close to the ones I need (see the two attached pages), except that it
> does not close the box at the bottom of the first and the top of the
> second page.

Some kind of wizard telling you it's impossible... As William said: the  
framed environment will do that kind of thing, only it doesn't allow the  
boxes to be open like those verbatim examples do. Also it won't do  
floating material like footnotes, marginpars and figures. For that you  
have to do something else. I did that recently by getting TeX to tell me  
exactly where such an environment started and where it ended on the first  
run and then getting eso-pic to draw the frame by hand during the second  
run.
-- 
Morten