LR Boxes
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Indian TEX Users Group
URL: http://www.river-valley.com/tug
5
On-line Tutorial on LATEX
The Tutorial Team
Indian TEX Users Group, SJP Buildings, Cotton Hills
Trivandrum 695014, INDIA
2000
Prof. (Dr.) K. S. S. Nambooripad, Director, Center for Mathematical Sciences, Trivandrum, (Editor); Dr. E. Krishnan,
Reader in Mathematics, University College, Trivandrum; T. Rishi, Focal Image (India) Pvt. Ltd., Trivandrum;
L. A. Ajith, Focal Image (India) Pvt. Ltd., Trivandrum; A. M. Shan, Focal Image (India) Pvt. Ltd., Trivandrum;
C. V. Radhakrishnan, River Valley Technologies, Software Technology Park, Trivandrum constitute the Tutorial team
This document is generated from LATEX sources compiled with pdfLATEX v. 14e in an
INTEL Pentium III 700 MHz system running Linux kernel version 2.2.14-12. The
packages used are hyperref.sty and pdfscreen.sty
c 2000, Indian TEX Users Group. This document may be distributed under the terms of the
LATEX Project Public License, as described in lppl.txt in the base LATEX distribution, either
version 1.0 or, at your option, any later version
LR Boxes
Paragraph Boxes
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5 Several Kinds of Boxes
The theory of composing pages out of boxes lies at the very heart of TEX and many LATEX
constructs are available to take advantage of this method of composition.
A box is an object that is treated by TEX as a single character. A box cannot be split and
broken across lines or pages. Boxes can be moved up, down, left and right. LATEX has three
types of boxes.
LR (left-right)--The content of this box are typeset from left to right.
Par (paragraphs)--This kind of box can contain several lines, which will be typeset in
paragraph mode just like normal text. Paragraphs are put one on top of the other.
Their widths are controlled by a user specified value.
Rule A thin or thick line that is often used to separate various logical elements on the
output page, such as between table rows and columns and between running titles
and the main text.
5.1. LR Boxes
The usage information of four types of LR boxes are given below. The first line considers
the text inside the curly braces as a box, without or with a frame drawn around it. For
instance, \fbox{some words} gives some words whereas \mbox will do the same thing,
but without the ruled frame around the text.
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\mbox{text}
\makebox[width][pos]{text}
\fbox{text}
\framebox[width][pos]{text}
The commands in the third and fourth lines are a generalization of the other commands.
They allow the user to specify the width of the box and the positioning of text inside.
some words
some words
\makebox[5cm]{some words} \par
\framebox[5cm][r]{some words}
In addition to the centering the text with positional argument [c] (the default), you can
position the text flush left ([l]). LATEX also offers you an [s] specifier that will stretch
your text from the left margin to the right margin of the box provided it contains some
stretchable space. The inter-word space is also stretchable and shrinkable to a certain
extent.
With LATEX, the above box commands with arguments for specifying the dimensions of the
box allow you to make use of four special length parameters: \width, \height, \depth
and \totalheight. They specify the natural size of the text, where \totalheight is the
sum of the \height and \depth.
See the next page for the coding examples.
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A few words of advice
A few words of advice
A few words of advice
\framebox{A few words of advice}
\framebox[\width+4mm][s]{A few words of advice}
\framebox[1.5\width]{A few words of advice}
As seen in the margin of the current line, boxes with zero width can be used to make text
stick out in the margin. This effect was produced by beginning the paragraph as follows:
\makebox[0mm][r]{\color{red}$\Leftrightarrow$}
As seen in the margin of the . . .
The appearance of frameboxes can be controlled by two style parameters.
\fboxrule The width of the lines comprising the box produced with the command \fbox
or \framebox. The default value in all standard classes is 0.4pt.
\fboxsep The space left between the edge of the box and its contents by \fbox or
\framebox. The default value in all standard classes is 3pt.
Text in a box
Text in a box
\fbox{Text in a box}
\setlength\fboxrule{2pt}\setlength\fboxsep{2mm}
\fbox{Text in a box}
Another interesting possibility is to raise or lower boxes. This can be achieved by the very
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powerful \raisebox command, which has two obligatory and two optional parameters,
defined as follows:
\raisebox{lift}[depth][height]{contents}
Given below is an example of lowered and elevated text boxes.
baseline
upward
baseline
downward
baseline
baseline \raisebox{1ex}{upward} baseline
\raisebox{-1ex}{downward} baseline
As with \makebox and \framebox the LATEX implementation of \raisebox offers you
the use of the lengths \height, \depth, \totalheight and \width in the first three
arguments. Thus, to pretend that a box extends only 90% of its actual height above the
baseline you could write:
\raisebox{0pt}[0.9\height]{text}
or to rotate a box around its lower left corner (instead of its reference point lying on the
baseline), you could raise it by its \depth first, e.g.:
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x1
Bad
thing
x2
Bad
thing
x3
Bad
thing
x4
$x_1$ \doturn{\fbox{Bad thing}}
$x_2$ \doturn{\raisebox{\depth}
{\fbox{Bad thing}}}
$x_3$ \doturn{\raisebox{-\height}
{\fbox{Bad thing}}} $x_4$
5.2. Paragraph Boxes
Paragraph boxes are constructed using the \parbox command or minipage environment.
The text material is typeset in paragraph mode inside a box of width width. The vertical
positioning of the box with respect the text baseline is controlled by the one-letter optional
parameter pos ([c], [t], and [b]).
\parbox[pos]{width}{text}
is the usage for \parbox command, whereas that of the minipage environment will look
like:
\begin{minipage}[pos]{width}
. . . here goes the text matter . . .
\end{minipage}
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The center position is the default as shown by the next example. You can also observe
that LATEX might produce wide inter-word spaces if the measure is incredibly small.
This is the contents of the left-
most parbox.
CURRENT LINE
This is the right-most parbox.
Note that the typeset text looks
sloppy because LATEX cannot nicely
balance the material in these nar-
row columns.
The code for generating these three \parbox's in a row is given below:
\parbox{.3\linewidth}
{This is the contents of the left-most parbox.}
\hfill CURRENT LINE \hfill
\parbox{.3\linewidth}
{This is the right-most parbox. Note that the typeset
text looks sloppy because \LaTeX{} cannot nicely balance
the material in these narrow columns.}
The minipage environment is very useful for the placement of material on the page.
In effect, it is a complete mini-version of a page and can contain its own footnotes,
paragraphs, and array, tabular and multicols (we will learn about these later)
environments. A simple example of minipage environment at work is given below. The
baseline is indicate with a small red line.
\begin{minipage}[b]{.3\linewidth}
The minipage environment creates a vertical box
like the parbox command. The bottom line of this
minipage is aligned with the
\end{minipage}\hrulefill
\begin{minipage}[c]{.3\linewidth}
middle of this narrow parbox, which in turn is
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aligned with
\end{minipage}\hrulefill
\begin{minipage}[t]{.3\linewidth}
the top line of the right hand minipage. It is recommended
that the user experiment with the positioning arguments to
get used to their effects.
\end{minipage}
The minipage environment cre-
ates a vertical box like the
parbox command. The bot-
tom line of this minipage is
aligned with the
middle of this narrow
parbox, which in turn is
aligned with
the top line of the right hand
minipage. It is recommended
that the user experiment with
the positioning arguments to
get used to their effects.
5.3. Paragraph boxes with specific height
In LATEX, the syntax of the \parbox and minipage has been extended to include two more
optional arguments.
\parbox[pos][height][inner pos]{width}{text}
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is the usage for \parbox command, whereas that of the minipage environment will look
like:
\begin{minipage}[pos][height][inner pos]{width}
. . . here goes the text matter . . .
\end{minipage}
In both cases, height is a length specifying the height of the box; the parameters \height,
\width, \depth, and \totalheight may be employed within the emph argument in the
same way as in the width argument of \makebox and \framebox.
The optional argument inner pos states how the text is to be positioned internally,
something that is only meaningful if height has been given. Its possible values are:
t to push the text to the top of the box
b to shove it to the bottom
c to center it vertically
s to stretch it to fill up the whole box
In the last case, rubber lengths (glue element) should be present where the vertical
stretching is to take place.
Note the difference between the external positioning argument pos and the internal one
inner pos: the former states how the box is to be aligned with the surrounding text, while
the latter determines how the contents are placed within the box itself. See an example
below. We frame the minipages to make it more comprehensive.
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This is a mini-
page with a
height of 3 cm
with the text
aligned at the
top.
In this minipage
of same height,
the text is verti-
cally centered.
In this third box
of same height,
text is aligned at
the bottom.
In this fourth
box of same
height, the text
is stretched to fill
in the entire ver-
tical space.
See the code that generated above boxed material:
\fbox{%
\begin{minipage}[b][3cm][t]{2cm}
This is a minipage with a height of 3~cm with the text aligned
at the top.
\end{minipage}}\hfill
\fbox{%
\begin{minipage}[b][3cm][c]{2cm}
In this minipage of same height, the text is vertically centered.
\end{minipage}}\hfill
\fbox{%
\begin{minipage}[b][3cm][b]{2cm}
In this third box of same height, text is aligned at the bottom.
\end{minipage}}\hfill
\fbox{%
\begin{minipage}[b][3cm][s]{2cm}
\baselineskip 10pt plus 2pt minus 2pt
In this fourth box of same height, the text is stretched
to fill in the entire vertical space.
\end{minipage}}
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5.4. Nested boxes
The box commands described above may be nested to any desired level. Including an LR
box within a parbox or a minipage causes no obvious conceptual difficulties. The opposite,
a parbox within an LR box, is also possible, and is easy to visualize if one keeps in mind
that every box is a unit, treated by TEX as a single character of the corresponding size.
A parbox inside an \fbox command has the effect that the entire parbox
is framed. The present structure was made with
\fbox{\fbox{\parbox{.75\linewidth}{A parbox ...}}}
This is a parbox of width .75\linewidth inside a fbox inside a second
fbox, which thus produces the double framing effect.
5.5. Rule boxes
A rule box is a basically a filled-in black rectangle. The syntax for the general command is:
\rule[ lift ]{ width }{ height }
which produces a solid rectangle of width width and height height, raised above the base-
line by an amount lift. Thus \rule{8mm}{3mm} generates and \rule{3in}{.2pt}
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generates .
Without an optional argument lift, the rectangle is set on the baseline of the current line
of the text. The parameters lift, width and height are all lengths. If lift has a negative
value, the rectangle is set below the baseline.
It is also possible to have a rule box of zero width. This creates an invisible line with the
given height. Such a construction is called a strut and is used to force a horizontal box to
have a desired height or depth that is different from that of its contents.