I am designing a layout of a non-fiction book, with a timeline (with historic facts) as an aside to some chapters, running over several pages. The idea is to devote the bottom 20% of each page to it.

Is there a way to make a pull box span several pages?

Alternatively, I could split up the information and make several separate boxes, one for each page (which would make the source-text less general). In that case I would need a way to position the Nth box on the Nth page of a chapter. This can probably be done with margin boxes. But that could interfere with the footer information.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

That sounds tricky. At the moment, splitting it into multiple boxes will be necessary, I will investigate what is the best way to put them on consecutive pages.

Thank you!

Maybe a wild idea: as there a two story lines, we could generate two pdfs, one for the main text, and one for the multi-page timeline, and then superimpose the two pdfs (I don't know of software that can do it, but it could work in principle).

I understand that this is a tricky question. I am currently thinking if we could use javascript in any way to fill the boxes, but I don't see immediately how.

This sounds weird, but you could actually make the pull box content one big multi-page footnote. I've attached a sample document below.h

1. pull.html‎ 16.5 kB
2. pull.pdf‎ 45.7 kB

Weird as it may sound, it is a great idea. Many thanks!