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From: sstern@astbe.UUCP (Mister Tvister)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Boxing problem with LaTeX
Keywords: TeX LaTeX
Message-ID: <824@astbe.UUCP>
Date: 25 Sep 89 12:03:52 GMT
Organization: GEI Software Technik Berlin, Germany
Lines: 23

I would like to hear from LaTeX users who have successfully tackled the
following:

In a report style text recourse is occasionally made to examples, which appear
with the distinctions granted them by \begin{verbatim} ... \end{verbatim}, that
is, in a different font sandwiched between appropriately large slabs of
vertical whitespace.  There are doubtless other methods of letting blocks of
text stand out from their context but "verbatim" (or something equivalent) will
be required in the common event where line filling (because something messy
like a terminal session is being described) must be temporarily suspended.

One should like to further isolate these examples from their surroundings using
boxes.  A boxed example has a line frame around it with narrow blank margins,
inside and outside the frame on all four sides.  The frame will accordingly be
as long as a text line and approximately as high as the block manipulated
internally by the "verbatim" mechanism.

I am no (La)TeX whiz but could also not discern in the LaTeX reference book
any means to accomplish this.  In fact, I didn't even find a convincing TeX
starting point since the most general methods of box drawing seem always to
involve absolute co-ordinates and examples, unless one relegates them to an
unhappy existence as figures in an appendix, are necessarily anchored by
context.