Stacking two hboxes

Question

I am trying to write the macro \foo{...}{...} that creates an hbox made up of both \hbox{#1} and \hbox{#2}, such that both hboxes are stacked one on top of the other. The width of the resulting hbox should be the maximum of the two hboxes. The arguments to the macro are in plain mode (i.e., not in math mode).

I'm not very good with raw TeX. Can someone please help?

Answer 1

In general you can stack \hboxes inside a \vbox (which should be placed inside a \hbox as well if you want to use the result in horizontal mode), like Gonzalo Medina shows in his nice answer.

There are also some macros and packages for this:

• \shortstack{foo\\bar} will stack foo over bar (adding \struts might be a good idea to get correct baseline skip)
• The small minibox package provides \minibox:
  \minibox{foo\\bar}
  It also accepts an optional argument [l], [c] or [r] to align the lines.

Both macros allow for more than two hbox'es/lines.

Answer 2

Perhaps something like this?

\documentclass{article}
\newcommand*\foo[2]{%
  \hbox{\vbox{\hbox{#1}\hbox{#2}}}
}

\begin{document}

\foo{some}{test text}

\end{document}

or (more in TeX's spirit):

\documentclass{article}
\def\foo#1#2{%
  \hbox{\vbox{\hbox{#1}\hbox{#2}}}
}

\begin{document}

\foo{some}{test text}

\end{document}