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

4.7. Boxes 93
contents as a unit with the neighboring text or boxes. An example of this
is given in Exercise 4.10.
Finally, vertical boxes such as \parbox commands and minipage environments
may be saved as the text in an \sbox or \savebox command,
to be recalled later with \usebox, as described in Section 4.7.1.
4.7.8 Box style parameters
There are two style parameters for the frame boxes \fbox and \framebox that
! may be reset by the user:
\fboxrule determines the thickness of the frame lines,
\fboxsep sets the amount of spacing between the frame and enclosed text.
New values are assigned to these length parameters in the usual L AT E X manner with
the command \setlength: the line thickness for all the following \framebox
and \fbox commands is set to 0.5 mm with \setlength{\fboxrule}{0.5mm}.
The scope of these settings also obeys the usual rule: if they are found
in the preamble then they apply to the entire document; if they are within an
environment then they are valid only until the end of that environment.
These parameters do not influence the \framebox command that is employed
within the picture environment (Section 13.1.4) and which has different syntax
and functionality from those of the normal \framebox command.
Exercise 4.10: How can the following nested structure be generated? (Note: font
size is \footnotesize)
The first line of this 3.5 cm
wide minipage or parbox is
aligned with the first line
of the neighboring minipage
or parbox.
This 4.5 cm wide minipage or parbox
is positioned so that its top
line is at the same level as that of
the box on the left, while its bottom
line is even with that of the
box on the right. The naïve notion
that this arrangement may be
achieved with the positioning arguments
set to t, t, and b is incorrect.
Why? What would this
selection really produce?
The true solution
involves the nesting
of two of the three
structures in an enclosing
minipage,
which is then separately
aligned with the
third one.
Note: there are two variants for the solution, depending on whether the left and
middle structures are first enclosed in a minipage, or the middle and right ones.
Try to work out both solutions. Incidentally, the third minipage is 3 cm wide.
Note: the problems of correctly aligning two side-by-side boxes as a pair on a
line of text (Section 4.7.4) arises here once more. It will be necessary to add a
dummy line to get the vertical alignment correct.
Exercise 4.11: Produce the framed structure shown below and store it with
the command \sbox{\warning}{structure}. You will first have to create a
box named \warning with the \newsavebox{\warning} command. Print this
warning at various places in your exercise file by giving \usebox{\warning}.