Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition) (Tools and Techniques

88 Chapter 4. Displayed Text
Baseline \raisebox{1ex}{high} and \raisebox{-1ex}{low}
and back again
produces: Baseline high and low and back again.
The values for height and depth can be totally different from the actual
ones of the text. Their effect is to determine how far away the previous and
next lines of text should be from the current line, based on the heights
and depths of all the boxes (characters are also boxes) in the line. By
raising a box but specifying height to be the regular character size, the
raised box will overprint the line above, and similarly for depth when a
box is lowered.
4.7.3 Parboxes and minipages
Whole paragraphs can be put into separate vertical boxes (or parboxes in
the L AT E X jargon) with the command
\parbox[pos]{width}{text}
or with the environment
\begin{minipage}[pos]{width} text \end{minipage}
Both produce a vertical box of width width, in which the lines of text are
stacked on top of each other as in normal paragraph mode.
The optional positioning argument pos can take on the values
b to align the bottom edge of the box with the current baseline,
t to align the top line of text with the current baseline.
Without any positioning argument, the parbox is centered vertically on
the baseline of the external line of text.
The positioning argument is only meaningful when the \parbox command
or the minipage environment occurs within a line of text, for
otherwise the current line and its baseline have no meaning. If the parbox
is immediately preceded by a blank line, it begins a new paragraph. In
this case, the vertical positioning of the parbox is made with reference
to the following elements of the paragraph. These could be further parboxes.
If the paragraph consists of only a single parbox or minipage, the
positioning argument is meaningless and has no effect.
Examples:
\parbox{3.5cm}{\sloppy This is a 3.5 cm wide parbox. It is
vertically centered on the}
\hfill CURRENT LINE \hfill
\parbox{5.5cm}{Narrow pages are hard to format. They usually
produce many warning messages on the monitor. The command
\texttt{\symbol{92}sloppy} can stop this.}