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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX
If you are documenting computer procedures, you probably need fixed-width type for examples of programming or data input or output. Even if you are writing about completely non-computer topics, you may often want to quote a URI, filename, an email address, or raw text containing characters which you don’t want interpreted by LATEX and which needs to be typeset specially, using a fixed-width font.
LATEX includes two features for handling fixed-format text: inline verbatim and display verbatim. There are many more variations available in other packages.
To specify a word or phrase as verbatim text in typewriter type within a sentence, use the special command \verb, followed by the word or phrase surrounded by any suitable character which does not occur in the word or phrase itself. This is a very rare exception to the rule that arguments go in curly braces.
For example, you could use the plus sign to show a LATEX command in a manual like this one:
You can typeset a phrase verbatim, even if it includes
\LaTeX\ command characters, for example the command to
insert an image: \verb+\includegraphics[width=3in]{myhouse}+You can typeset a phrase verbatim, even if it includes LATEX command characters, for example the command to insert an image: \includegraphics[width=3in]{myhouse}
The plus sign is ‘safe’ to use here because it doesn’t appear in the code you want to typeset but you could use the grave accent or backtick key ` or the vertical bar | if the phrase already had a plus sign in it:
for example \verb|\(a=b+c)| when illustrating the \LaTeX\ equation \(a=b+c\).
for example \(a=b+c\) when illustrating the LATEX equation a=b+c.
The \verb command has the advantage that it turns off all special characters (see § 1.7 above) except the one you use as the delimiter, so you can easily quote sequences of characters in any computer syntax — including TEX. However, LATEX will never break the argument of \verb at a line-end when formatting a paragraph, even if it contains spaces, so if it happens to be long, and falls towards the end of a line, it will stick out into the margin. See § 1.10.2 above for more information on line-ends and hyphenation. The argument to \verb MUST NOT contain a linebreak in your editor: this will cause it to fail. See also the warning about using \verb inside \footnote.
URIs are a special case which would cause problems when typesetting: legibility and line-breaks in long web addresses. LATEX overcomes with these with the url package (also used by the hyperref package which can make URIs into links).
It is important for URIs to be visibly accurate, so they can be copied and retyped from print.
It is therefore ESSENTIAL to use a typeface which distinguishes clearly between 1 (digit one), l (lowercase ell) and I (uppercase eye), and between 0 (zero) and O (uppercase oh). Monospaced ‘typewriter’ type usually makes this clear, but many sans-serif fonts do not. It is a common error by designers to fail to distinguish URIs in this way.
URIs (especially long ones) must never have a hyphen added if they have to be broken over a line-end, because it might be mistaken (and retyped) by the user as a real hyphen needed as a part of the address. Conversely, any existing hyphen must never be used at a line-end to avoid exactly this confusion.
Handling a URI therefore means being able to perform a hyphenless line-break, but only at some existing punctuation characters — principally the slash and the dot — but not usually the hyphen. The url package does the line-breaking and will never add new hyphens.
The url package provides the command \url which works in the same way as \verb, but uses the standard curly braces to enclose the address, eg \url{https://latex.silmaril.ie} — the command understands the syntax of a URI (Berners-Lee, Fielding & Masinter, 2005) and will never break mid-way through an unpunctuated word, only at slashes and full points (and never at embedded hyphens except in rare circumstances when the hyphen package option is used).
Bear in mind, however, that spaces and non-ASCII characters are invalid in URIs, so using spaces in a \url argument will cause it to fail, as will using other non-URI-valid characters.
The hyperref package mentioned above makes hyperlinks for cross-references, citations, and URIs which are clickable in LATEX’s PDFs (it’s used in the PDF version of this document). It can also make footnote links clickable, although because they are usually on the same page, this is probably not needed in most documents.
You can load the package with footnote links turned off, and the different classes of link (cross-references, citations, and URIs) can be in different colours:
\usepackage[hyperfootnotes=false]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{linkcolor=DarkGreen,citecolor=DarkRed,
urlcolor=Blue,pdfborder=0 0 0,
allbordercolors=0 0 0,colorlinks=true}
\AtBeginDocument{\renewcommand{\UrlFont}{\ttfamily}}In some systems, links get borders drawn around them, but in the example above they are turned off by making their colour invisible (0 0 0). The hyperref package likes to use the roman font for URIs (normally A Bad Idea as we saw above in item ‘Visible accuracy’ above) but this can be turned off by changing the value of \UrlFont back to ttfamily.
The listings package, which we look at more below for display verbatim, also has an inline form. This can use colour to highlight your examples based on the language you are documenting — I am using it extensively in the PDF of this book.
The command \lstinline uses the same syntax as \verb (two matching but otherwise unused characters) to enclose the argument, but it provides for very extensive options to specify the language, font, size, style, and formatting. The most useful option is the language, of which about 100 are predefined, from ADA to Verilog, and you can add new keywords and even whole new languages.
This is probably the most effective way to show computer-language examples inline, because it handles the syntax-based enhancement (colourisation) for you. It is, however, still subject to the same limitations as \verb, in that the code must fit on the space available in the line, or it will stick out into the margin.
For example, you could use \verb+\listinline+ to show a different \LaTeX\ command:
\lstinline[language={[LaTeX]TeX}]`\verb+\includegraphics[width=3in]{myhouse}+`
using backticks because the \verb+\verb+ command has plus signs, in order to display
\lstinline{[LaTeX]TeX}]+\includegraphics[width=3in]{myhouse}+.For example, you could use \verb+\lstinline+ to show a different LATEX command: \lstinline[language={[LaTeX]TeX}]`\verb+\includegraphics[width=3in]{myhouse}+` using backticks because the \verb+\verb+ command has plus signs, in order to display \lstinline[language={[LaTeX]TeX}]+\includegraphics[width=3in]{myhouse}+.
For longer (multiline) chunks of fixed-format text like examples of programming, use the verbatim environment. Like \verb, this turns off all special characters, so you can include anything at all in the verbatim text except the exact line \end{verbatim}, which MUST occur on a line by itself, starting at the beginning of the line (not indented).
\begin{verbatim}
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,oneside]{report}
\begin{document}
\title{Practical Typesetting}
\author{Peter Flynn\\Silmaril Consultants}
\date{December 2004}
\maketitle
\end{document}
\end{verbatim}For more control over formatting there are two useful packages: the verbatim package, which overcomes a few of the limitations of the built-in verbatim environment; and the fancyvrb package, which provides much greater flexibility with a Verbatim environment (note the capital letter).
However, as mentioned above, the much more powerful environments for code listings provided by the listings have the ability to colour the keywords of a program according to the language used, and they can also add rules, interpret internal formatting, and include external files, and let you add your own language definitions for new languages. The penalty is a slightly more complex configuration, but if you are documenting any kind of computer code in significant quantities, the quality and usability of the result is well worth it.
The listings package has some specific defaults which (in my experience) most users prefer to override. By default it uses the current font, not the monospace font normally expected for listings; possibly because its advanced per-language formatting can create more human-readable code in a variable-width font (see Figure 4.6 below).
\begin{lstlisting}[language=Pascal]
for i:=maxint to 0 do
begin
{ do nothing }
end;
Write( 'Case insensitive' ) ;
WritE( 'Pascal keywords.' ) ;
\end{lstlisting}
Colours for a language can be set independently for keywords, identifiers, comments, and strings. Type size is also configurable, as are background colour, framing, alignment, and character mapping (important if your listing contains non-ASCII characters). It's also possible to define new languages not currently covered.
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,oneside]{report} \begin{document} \title{Practical Typesetting} \author{Peter Flynn\\Silmaril Consultants} \date{December 2026} \maketitle \end{document}
As an example, the settings used in this book include the following:
\lstdefinelanguage{LaTeXe}{%
language = [LaTeX]TeX,
morekeywords = {selectlanguage,foreignlanguage,textbrokenbar,%
textlangle,textrangle,subsection,url,chapter,tableofcontents,%
part,subsubsection,paragraph,subparagraph,maketitle,setlength,%
listoffigures,listoftables,color,arraybackslash,includegraphics,%
textcite,parencite,footcite,graphicspath,lstinline,DeclareLanguageMapping,
textcolor,definecolor,colorbox,fcolorbox,setmainfont,setsansfont,%
setmonofont,fancyhead,fancyfoot,printbibliography,Extension,Path,%
UprightFont,BoldFont,ItalicFont,BoldItalicFont,newfontfamily,%
newfontface,lstset,lstinline},
}
\lstset{defaultdialect=LaTeXe,frame=single,framesep=6pt,
backgroundcolor=\color{AliceBlue},
rulecolor=\color{LightSteelBlue},framerule=1pt}
\newcommand\basicdefault[1]{%
\color{Black}\fontsize{\f@size}{\f@baselineskip}\selectfont\ttfamily#1}
\lstset{basicstyle=\basicdefault{\spaceskip.5em}}
\lstset{keywordstyle=\color{DarkGreen}\bfseries,
identifierstyle=\color{Maroon},
commentstyle=\color{Gray}\upshape,
stringstyle=\color{DarkBlue}\upshape,
emphstyle=\color{Chocolate}\upshape,
showstringspaces=false,
columns=fullflexible,
keepspaces=true}%The original term Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is now deprecated in favour of the more accurate Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). For details see https://www.w3.org/Addressing/. The older term still persists, especially in this LATEX package and its command, and in some XML markup vocabularies so it is retained for historical compatibility.
In fact I am using the hyphens option for the url package in this book because of some very dense URIs.
A number of environments which do complicated things with the category codes of characters have this requirement to end the environment with the \end{...} command on a line by itself, at the start of the line. These include the more advanced Verbatim environment from the fancyvrb package, and any of the \end{...} commands taken over by the endfloat package.