Do fontsize environments exist?

Question

Without any doubt there are fontsize switches in the form of control sequences (described here for instance.) But, from time to time I ran into code examples where environment versions of those were used, e.g. \begin{small}...\end{small}. After testing those successfully I began to incorporate them into my TeX vocabulary.

A few days ago @GonzaloMedina commented on one of my answers that those environments do not exists and constructions relying on them work by pure coincidence. Then I tried to find out more about those ominous environments. Ominous because they don't seem to be somehow documentated. (The only thing I found that tried to explain them in a somehow systematical manner was some Wikibooks resource.)

Are these environments real or not?

Answer 1

You can use any LaTeX command defined by \newcommand and wrap a \begin{}...\end{} pair around it, however, it's not recommended, since this is not an environment.

The interesting thing is, however, that grouping works anyway, but this is consequence of \begin...\end.

There are no fontsize environments like \begin{small} etc, as there aren't \begin{chapter} etc.

See for example:

\documentclass{article}


\newcommand{\foo}{This does nothing}

\begin{document}
\begin{foo}

\end{foo}
\end{document}

Edit Some explanations

This code can be found in latex.ltx, see lines 4058f.

\def\begin#1{%
  \@ifundefined{#1}%
    {\def\reserved@a{\@latex@error{Environment #1 undefined}\@eha}}%
    {\def\reserved@a{\def\@currenvir{#1}%
     \edef\@currenvline{\on@line}%
     \csname #1\endcsname}}%
  \@ignorefalse
  \begingroup\@endpefalse\reserved@a}

It can be seen, that @ifundefined{foo} would be called, which is false, since it \foo is defined, so the environment name foo is set and \csname #1\endcsname (i.e. \foo) is called.

Now the \end{foo}: part

\def\end#1{%
  \csname end#1\endcsname\@checkend{#1}%
  \expandafter\endgroup\if@endpe\@doendpe\fi
  \if@ignore\@ignorefalse\ignorespaces\fi}

Environments look for the \end... code, here \endfoo, which isn't defined, but \csname endfoo\endcsname expands to a \relax and nothing bad happens.

It should be noted, that many of the well-known environments aren't defined with \newenvironment. It's sufficient to use a \foo command and \def\endfoo, see \endequation or \endenumerate etc. for example.

Answer 2

Any command may be used as an environment, and if surrounding large blocks of text it is often convenient, so

{\small  zzz\par}

and

\begin{small}%
zzzz

\end{small}

are more or less equivalent.

Note however that unlike \small, spaces after \begin{small} are not dropped due to normal TeX tokenization rules. Also you almost always need a \par or blank line before the \end which is also true in the command form, but easier to forget in the environment form as most custom environments such as center included an implicit \par in their end code, but that is not the case here.

See also the discussion in:

Are \end.... macro names reserved in LaTeX2e?

Answer 3

Actually, the “LaTeXbook” (properly “LaTeX. A Document Preparation System”, by Leslie Lamport) endorses the use of such environments: at the end of page 27 we find:

Every declaration has a corresponding environment of the same name (minus the \ character). Typing

\begin{em} ... \end{em}

is equivalent to typing {\em ... }.

In particular, the “environmental” form automatically supplies a group to keep the effects of the declaration local, as always happens with environments (\begin issues a \begingroup, and \end the corresponding \endgroup). Now, \small is a declaration, so the above applies.

This has been done purposedly, so I don’t deem it correct to say that these environments work “by chance”; indeed, as has already been observed, the lack of a definition of a command like \endsmall does not rise any problem, because it is called as \csname small\endcsname and is therefore equivalent to \relax if undefined.

So, in the end my answer is: “Yes, these environments are ‘real’” (whatever this means).

---

Addition

After seeing some of the comments, I thought that it might be useful to add some details about how environments are implemented in LaTeX2e (I’m not going to speak of LaTeX3 because I havan’t got enough expertize). Christian Hupfer has already presented the exact code excerpts from latex.ltx, but perhaps someone will find the following additional remarks useful as well.

When you define environment FOO, LaTeX simply defines two new commands, \FOO and \endFOO: the latter is always without arguments, while the former has the same argument(s), if any, that have been specified for the environment FOO. When a \begin{FOO} is encountered, the following things happen (among others):

• a group is begun with \begingroup;

• the argument of \begin (FOO, in this case) is saved (locally) in the macro \@currenvir, to be able to check, later on, that each \end is paired with the correct \begin;

• the command \FOO is executed as the last thing; thus, it will absorb the arguments that follow \begin{fOO}, if they are present.

On the other hand, when LaTeX comes to \end{FOO}, the following happen (among other things):

• \endFOO is executed, if it is defined (nothing happens if it is not, as already explained above);

• LaTeX checks that the argument of \end is equal to \@currenvir and rises an error if not;

• an \endgroup is issued to close the group.

Actually, when I define a new environment based on another, standard one, I prefer to avoid using explicit \begin and \end, so that the value of \@currenvir is not changed. For example, suppose I want to define a variant of the quote environment that italicizes its contents; I prefer, say,

\newenvironment{italquote}{%
  \quote
  \itshape
}{\endquote}

over

\newenvironment{italquote}{%
  \begin{quote}%
  \itshape
}{\end{quote}}

especially if I am not going to use the environment myself. In this way, if users misspell the name of the environment in the \end statement, they will get an error about an incorrectly terminated italquote environment, which is what they actually used, not about an incorrectly terminated quote environment, of which they could be unaware.