8

Am I missing something, or is it simply not possible to underline text within a verbatim environment?

\begin{verbatim}
  I want to underline the following word: word
\end{verbatim}

I guess I could ask the same question with regard to bold or italic print, but in those cases I can see that this is not what you can do with an ordinary typewriter. But any typewriter has an underscore and I can use it to underscore text. Can the verbatim environment not do that?

4
  • 3
    verbatim isn't designed to emulate a typewriter so much as literally show the input source. So you could of course do another line with ` ------` but if you want a typeset underline you need to escape back out of verbatim, possible with verbatim but easier to use the listings package which has a built in mechanism to allow escapes to TeX commands such as \underline or of course simply \texttt{I want to underline the following word: \underline{word}} May 30, 2013 at 12:09
  • Is it just text you need to typeset, or will it be special characters like \`, $, &, etc.? May 30, 2013 at 12:22
  • This sounds like you want formatting of keywords? It could be done using the listings package
    – cgnieder
    May 30, 2013 at 12:24
  • The aim is to typeset examples from transcripts that were transcribed according to the Jeffersson notation (liso.ucsb.edu/liso_archives/Jefferson/Transcript.pdf) or similar notations. Or rather, a simplified version, which does not include special characters but unterlining. The point is that these transcripts already exist as pdfs so that copying and pasting them into a verbatim environment seems like the easiest option.
    – Christoph
    Jun 2, 2013 at 18:17

1 Answer 1

7

Apart from the suggestions made in the comments, you might also consider fancyvrb. For example, you can write something like

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fancyvrb}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}

\begin{Verbatim}[commandchars=+\[\]]
    The +underline[quick brown fox] jumped over the lazy dog.
\end{Verbatim}

\end{document}

enter image description here

3
  • 1
    This did the job, thanks. However, it's not an ideal solution since I need quite a lot of characters to underline a single word (or even letter). So if anyone has a more efficient solution (someting like: The _quick brown fox_ jumped over the lazy dog), please post it!
    – Christoph
    Jun 2, 2013 at 18:39
  • @Christoph did you find any efficient solution to this problem? Nov 22, 2014 at 23:14
  • Have a look at tex.stackexchange.com/questions/39898/… It uses the listings package, but that has functionality to enable this sort of markdown-esque formatting.
    – Rikki
    Feb 1, 2017 at 22:25

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