framed and
shaded environments; both put their content into
something which looks like a framed (or coloured) box, but which
breaks as necessary at page end. The environments “lose” footnotes,
marginpars and head-line entries, and will not work with
multicol or other column-balancing macros. The
memoir class includes the functionality of the
framed package.
The boites package provides a breakbox
environment; examples of its use may be found in the distribution, and
the package’s README file contains terse documentation. The
environments may be nested, and may appear inside
multicols environments; however, floats, footnotes and
marginpars will be lost.
For Plain TeX users, the facilities of the backgrnd
package may be useful; this package subverts the output routine to
provide vertical bars to mark text, and the macros are clearly marked
to show where coloured backgrounds may be introduced (this requires
shade, which is distributed as tex macros and
device-independent Metafont for the shading). The author of
backgrnd claims that the package works with LaTeX 2.09, but
there are reasons to suspect that it may be unstable working with
current LaTeX.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=breakbox