[Tex/LaTex] How to format an inline source code

codeformattingline-breakingline-spacinglistings

I have a document where I quiet often refer to source code element, such as class names, I wanted to format these strings differently, but at the beginning I didn't want to fiddle with various options I had, rather I defined my custom command as follows:

\providecommand{\inlinecode}[1]{\texttt{#1}}

Now my question is, what do you think is the best way to define \inlinecode? Note: I often use text with unescaped <, >, e.g., List<T>.

The \texttt looks fine to me, and works with <, >, but sometimes the words overflow the line. Is there any way to tell latex not to overflow the line, but rather "underflow" or insert more spaces between words, which seems to me as (maybe still ugly but) more acceptable than overflow? And is it possible to achieve it by only changing definition of my command, so I won't have to change the whole source?

Best Answer

use package listings instead. Then you can use \lstinline|<List>|. You can define the setting with \lstset{...}. A backgroundcolor is possible with a \colorbox:

\colorbox{blue}{\lstinline[basicstyle=\ttfamily\color{white}]|<List>|}

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[Tex/LaTex] Temporarily increase the limit on space size

TeX has a primitive parameter for that kind of situation: \emergencystretch, of which Knuth writes in the TeXbook chapter 14

If you want to avoid overfull boxes at all costs without trying to fix them manually, you might be tempted to set \tolerance=10000; this allows arbitrarily bad lines to be acceptable in tough situations. But infinite tolerance is a bad idea, because TEX doesn’t distinguish between terribly bad and preposterously horrible lines. Indeed, a tolerance of 10000 encourages TEX to concentrate all the badness in one place, making one truly unsightly line instead of two moderately bad ones, because a single “write-off” produces fewest total demerits according to the rules. There’s a much better way to get the desired effect: TEX has a parameter called \emergencystretch that is added to the assumed stretchability of every line when badness and demerits are computed, in cases where overfull boxes are otherwise unavoidable. If \emergencystretch is positive, TEX will make a third pass over a paragraph before choosing the line breaks, when the first passes did not find a way to satisfy the \pretolerance and \tolerance. The effect of \emergencystretch is to scale down the badnesses so that large infinities are distinguishable from smaller ones. By setting \emergencystretch high enough (based on \hsize) you can be sure that the \tolerance is never exceeded; hence overfull boxes will never occur unless the line-breaking task is truly impossible.

So you could use, for example

\emergencystretch=.5em

[Tex/LaTex] Including LaTeX documentation as comments in source code

C# has a lot of support for structured comments (the /doc flag on the compiler, or "xml documentation checkbox in visual studio) so if you marked up your comments as

/// <summary>
///  The format of the date file
/// The date file consists of $4$ alphanumeric string\ldots
///  </summary>
/// <param name="s">...</param>
public void ParseDates(string s)

Then the compiler will warn you if the <param> descriptions don't match the declared parameter or if there are public methods with no description etc.

The C# compiler will output an XML file with something like

    <member name="M:YourNamespace.ParseDates(System.String)">
        <summary>...</summary>
        <param name = "s">...</param>
    </member>

The advantage being that this is written by the compiler so if you have C# files not included in the final project etc, just the right things get documented.

There are tools to process this (notably sandcastle) but mainly aimed at HTML. For LaTeX typesetting any basic text or XML processing stream should be able to extract the texts you need, and as the format is guaranteed to be more consistent it is a lot easier than parsing comments directly from the source files.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Temporarily increase the limit on space size

[Tex/LaTex] Including LaTeX documentation as comments in source code

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