Hi I'm using LateX. I have a block of text that I'd like to have a small box like space highlighting the are (just like a \begin{equation} but for text).
Is there such a thing in LateX?
I'm not 100% sure what you're asking I'm afraid, but if you just want to indent text with a margin on each side of the page to make it stand out, you can use...
\begin{quotation}
Quotation is good for long blocks of text that you want highlighted
\end{quotation}
\begin{quote}
Quote is suited to a single block of quoted text.
\end{quote}
If you actually want to have a physical black box around the text, you might want to consider wrapping it in a tabular / table, or you might want to delve into minipages and/or par box environments...
Is \makebox what you're looking for?
To create boxes of text that behave differently from the rest of the text, we can use
\makebox[width][pos]{text}
The width sets the width the of the box. The pos sets the positioning of the text - either r (right justified text), l (left justified), or s (stretched to fill the box). If the pos parameter is left out, as in \makebox[1in]{centerme}, the text is centered. The text is placed in the box. If you want to draw a box around the text, use \framebox just as you would use \makebox.
\mbox{text} and \fbox{text} are quick versions of \makebox and \framebox, which create a box to fit the size of the text.
There are some more examples at http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php?title=LaTeX:Layout#Boxes
Related
My question in short is: How can you create a boxed text with a label that can be referenced?
Background: I am generating LaTeX output from a Markdown document to be included in a larger LaTeX document. I would like to describe the steps of an algorithm as boxed text with a label that can be referenced. I know how to create a labeled figure and how to create boxed text, but I haven't been able to figure out how to combine the two, i.e. how to label the boxed text as if it was a figure, or how to include the text in a figure (other than converting it to an image, which I'd like to avoid).
An initial "solution": Just putting a the box and an empty figure next to each other (see below) kind of works, except that nothing ensures that the figure label won't float away from the box as I work on the document, since figures are floating objects while text boxes are part of the text, and the two are handled differently by LaTeX. Moreover, you may need to use LaTeX vertical space commands to make it look reasonably good, but it is hard to get it perfect. Is there a simple solution? Thanks!
P.S. I know that I could just switch to LaTeX and figure out a solution there, but here I am looking for a solution in Markdown, possibly making use of some embedded LaTeX commands.
You can see the algorithm in Figure \ref{methods:estimating}.
\fbox{\parbox{5in}{
1. Initialize $b_r=0$ for $r=1..R$ \\
2. For each item $i, i=1..U$, calculate ... \\
3. Re-estimate ... \\
4. Proceed to Step 2 until it converges.
}}
![Estimating ... \label{methods:estimating}]()
It is rendered like this:
You can use one of the packages for writing algorithms. See https://www.sharelatex.com/learn/algorithms.
I'm trying to get a way to automatically adjust the size of a minipage.
I am creating a report which will have several "paragraphs" that have a floating image on the left and some text on the right of that image and eventually below it if there is enough text. The both of them ( image + text ) make together a "semantic block".
First I did that :
\begin{wrapfigure}{L}{0.15\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.1\textwidth]{image}\\
\emph{image caption with no "figure1"}
\end{wrapfigure}
Text related to this image\\
Text related to this image\\
Text not related to this image\\
and of course the text not related to the image was considered like the other lines of text, printing on the right of the image.
So i tried to wrap it all :
\begin{minipage}[c][10cm]{20cm}
\begin{wrapfigure}{L}{0.15\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.1\textwidth]{image}\\
\emph{image caption with no "figure1"}
\end{wrapfigure}
Text related to this image\\
Text related to this image\\
\end{minipage}
Text not related to this image\\
but it really isn't convenient and the height is fixed.
If there is a better way to do it not using minipage that would be great too.
In the end i plan to make it into a \newenvironment taking 2 parameters : image name and text so I can use it easily in the article.
EDIT: fixed a typo in 2nd code
I'm trying to get my code snippets to look as good as possible and so far I'm having troubles with the character spacing. Here is an example of the output:
alt text http://grab.by/grabs/2bb230de7c088d007733f52b95a40363.png
While the text in small is perfect, all the keywords that are in capital letters look terrible. Here are the settings I use
\lstset{basicstyle=\footnotesize, basewidth=0.5em}
If I increase the basewidth, the capital letters look good, but I can't get any decent sized line of code in one line. The following example does not fit in a page and I already put two line breaks in:
alt text http://grab.by/grabs/97ec29aa5a6811ce28bcd30bd389b52f.png
Does anyone have a clue how I can get this to work? Using \ttfamily does the trick, however, I'd prefer keeping the font.
Thanks.
If you prioritize looking nice, then using flexible colums is preferable:
\lstset{basicstyle=\footnotesize, columns=fullflexible}
You "obviously" need to scale the capital letters down horizontally. I do not know of a way to do this without actually editing the font itself.
However, you could put the entire listing into a \scalebox resp. \resizebox (from the graphicx package).
On a side note, the font you are using seems a bit strange, though, since the distance between small letters is significantly bigger than that between capital letters.
What was the original historical use of the vertical tab character (\v in the C language, ASCII 11)?
Did it ever have a key on a keyboard? How did someone generate it?
Is there any language or system still in use today where the vertical tab character does something interesting and useful?
Vertical tab was used to speed up printer vertical movement. Some printers used special tab belts with various tab spots. This helped align content on forms. VT to header space, fill in header, VT to body area, fill in lines, VT to form footer. Generally it was coded in the program as a character constant. From the keyboard, it would be CTRL-K.
I don't believe anyone would have a reason to use it any more. Most forms are generated in a printer control language like postscript.
#Talvi Wilson noted it used in python '\v'.
print("hello\vworld")
Output:
hello
world
The above output appears to result in the default vertical size being one line. I have tested with perl "\013" and the same output occurs. This could be used to do line feed without a carriage return on devices with convert linefeed to carriage-return + linefeed.
Microsoft Word uses VT as a line separator in order to distinguish it from the normal new line function, which is used as a paragraph separator.
In the medical industry, VT is used as the start of frame character in the MLLP/LLP/HLLP protocols that are used to frame HL-7 data, which has been a standard for medical exchange since the late 80s and is still in wide use.
It was used during the typewriter era to move down a page to the next vertical stop, typically spaced 6 lines apart (much the same way horizontal tabs move along a line by 8 characters).
In modern day settings, the vt is of very little, if any, significance.
The ASCII vertical tab (\x0B)is still used in some databases and file formats as a new line WITHIN a field. For example:
In the .mer file format to allow new lines within a data field,
FileMaker databases can use vertical tabs as a linefeed (see https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/59096).
I have found that the VT char is used in pptx text boxes at the end of each line shown in the box in oder to adjust the text to the size of the box.
It seems to be automatically generated by powerpoint (not introduced by the user) in order to move the text to the next line and fix the complete text block to the text box. In the example below, in the position of §:
"This is a text §
inside a text box"
A vertical tab was the opposite of a line feed i.e. it went upwards by one line. It had nothing to do with tab positions. If you want to prove this, try it on an RS232 terminal.
similar to R0byn's experience, i was experimenting with a Powerpoint slide presentation and dumped out the main body of text on the slide, finding that all the places where one would typically find carriage return (ASCII 13/0x0d/^M) or line feed/new line (ASCII 10/0x0a/^J) characters, it uses vertical tab (ASCII 11/0x0b/^K) instead, presumably for the exact reason that dan04 described above for Word: to serve as a "newline" while staying within the same paragraph. good question though as i totally thought this character would be as useless as a teletype terminal today.
I believe it's still being used, not sure exactly. There might be even a key combination of it.
As English is written Left to Right, Arabic Right to Left, there are languages in world that are also written top to bottom. In that case a vertical tab might be useful same as the horizontal tab is used for English text.
I tried searching, but couldn't find anything useful yet.
How can I fully justify a block of text (like MS Word does, not only on the right and not only on the left but on both sides)?
I want to justify some texts (mainly arabic text) adjusted to certain screen size (some handheld device screen actually, and its text viewer doesn't have this function) and save this text as justified. So I can reload and reuse it again elsewhere.
(The problem with MS word is, that if you copy the justified text from MS Word and paste it to another editor it'll copy it un-justified).
Update : for now I'm thinking of doing it like this:
get-a-word
get-word-width
add-word-to-total-Word and add-Word-width-to-total-word-width
check if total-Word-width = myscreen-width then continue
else if total-Word-width is between myscree-wdith and (myscreen-width -3) then
add-spaces-To-total-word until it = myscreen-width
This is what I'm thinking now, but I put this question up and hope to see if there is a better solution, or somebody else already implemented it.
PS: I hope I have made my question clear and I'm sorry for bad expression if there is.
edit1 : changed the title to make it more clear.
If you want to justify plain text, you can only add extra spaces to the lines to get them align on the left and right. Unfortunately the character widths differ in fonts; so doing it this way will only work for a certain font, unless you limit yourself to monospaced fonts where all characters have the same size.
If you want a result like in Word, adding spaces won't cut it. Word will not add spaces, but stretch and shrink the existing spaces. This information is lost when you copy and paste it into another app.
Either way, justifying is an optimization problem. If you are interested in a good solution and its implementation: have a look a TeX. For an implementation that works on plain text with monospaced fonts have a look at par
There are some API calls that may help:
ExtTextOut and GetCharacterPlacement
Look at the GCP_JUSTIFY flag for GetCharacterPlacement
ExtTextOut is used by Canvas.TextRect
The problem you are going to face is always going to be differences in the rendering of the font. Word handles full justification by adjusting kerning as well as adjusting the number of pixels between words by a few (either way). The end result is lined up both margins. This pixel adjustment is done BOTH ways, and as evenly as possible.
To properly handle this in your portable device you will have to also perform the same algorithm for the display of the text there.
If this is not possible, then the ONLY way you can even get somewhat close would be to add whitespace between words.
As has been pointed out in other answers Word does full justification by stretching the existing spaces often by very small amounts. This is only possible if you have full control over how your text is drawn on the screen (which word - or any other windows program has).
You only real option in this regard would be to implement your own text viewer on the platform you are targeting. Eg you would need to draw the text on the screen yourself (any platform that allows games should allow you to draw on the screen). However this seems like an awful lot of trouble to get justified text.
Sorry couldn't be of more help.