Typesetting in Mathematica

Question

Are there typesetting environments/boxes or something similar in Mathematica?

I want to write some documentation for a notebook using text cells and I would like to have a brief description of my functions similar to the look of the Mathematica documentation (the part with the yellow background). Now, I have figured out how to change the background of (text) cells, but how can I have indentation and some vertical space to the running text? Is there some construct that is similar to the Latex-environments?

Clarification:

I woud like to get something like this:

I have build this by manually editing all font types, faces and colors. The vertical space is a point 5 empty line.

My questions:

1. Is there a better way to achieve this? (For example, a way, which is less tedious and which would allow me to change parameters in all instances later.)
2. How can one align the tab-width with the indentation of the input cells?
3. The kerning in the two rules differ. How would one achieve equal kerning?

Fun fact: Although Wolfram has apparently not put too much thought in their typesetting, let alone its documentation, they have not forgotten to have the "Mathematica" highlighted automatically :-)

Update/Bug

Fun fact 2: It seems that even the Mathematica documentation typography is broken: The indentation depends on the magnification.

The right and side is the built-in documentation at 200% magnification, the left hand side the online one at scaled up in a browser to the same size.

Answer 1

The Mathematica equivalent of a LaTeX environment is called a cell style. You will need to define a new cell style in your notebook, or better yet, define a new stylesheet with having your new style as one its styles.

I found google-ing on site:mathematica.stackexchange.com notebook styles turned up a number of relevant discussions on building stylesheets. You might use that google search as starting point for your efforts.