Manuscript Preparation, Copyediting, and Proofreading

Q. If sidebars or text boxes in a book have text references, what labels are used? They aren’t exactly figures or tables. Something like “(see text box 1.1)” doesn’t seem like a good solution, so could short titles be used instead, or is there a more elegant label I haven’t thought of?

A. “Box 1” (or “box 1.1” if you start over in each chapter) is the usual way to label text boxes. A title without a number wouldn’t give any clue to the location or sequence of the box, so in a long document or a document with many boxes, titles are not as helpful as numbering.