Problem with the alignment of characters

Question

I am having some trouble in displaying characters in LaTeX. Here is what I am doing.

I am performing a binary addition and would like to have all the characters aligned one below the other.

Here is the small example :

1010
1000 
----
0010

However, the problem I am facing is that the characters are not aligned in a vertical line. If it was a table, I could align left-edge or right edge, but not here.

I would prefer, here, 1-1-0, 0-0-0, 1-0-1, 0-0-0 are aligned in a single line vertically.

I am trying to give proper spacing, but it does not look elegant in the pdf. It looks misaligned with a long sequence of binary number.

P.S : Attached is the screen shot of the pdf file.

\documentclass[twoside,english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{2}
\setcounter{tocdepth}{2}
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
\newdimen\digitwidth 
\settowidth\digitwidth{0} 
\def~{\hspace{\digitwidth}}
\def\divrule#1#2{% 
\noalign{\moveright#1\digitwidth% 
\vbox{\hrule width#2\digitwidth}}} 
\begin{tabular}[b]{@{}r@{}} 
%10010 
\\ \hline 
\big|\begin{tabular}[t]{@{}l@{}} 
1010 1111\\ 
1000 1000 \\ 
\divrule{0}{10} 
~~ 1000 1000 \\ 
\end{tabular} 
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Answer 1

Perhaps defining a new environment

\newlength{\digitwidth}
\newcommand\divrule[2]{\noalign{\moveright#1\digitwidth\vbox{\hrule width#2\digitwidth}}}
\newenvironment{bdivision}[1]
  {\settowidth\digitwidth{0}\setlength{\tabcolsep}{\digitwidth}%
   \def~{\hspace{\digitwidth}}%
   \hphantom{#1~\vrule}\begin{tabular}{l@{}}
   \hline\relax\llap{#1~\vrule\strut\hspace{\tabcolsep}\kern-0.4pt}\ignorespaces}
  {\end{tabular}}

and inputting data as

\begin{bdivision}{10010}
1010~1111~1111~1111~0000~0010\\
1000~1000~0001~0000~1 \\
\divrule{1}{21}
~~10~0111~1110~1111~100 \\
~~10~0010~0000~0100~001 \\
\divrule{3}{27}
~~~~~~101~1110~1011~1010~00
\end{bdivision}

(the digits are almost at random, but this should be the idea).

Answer 2

Update (old solution moved to bottom)

Now that I MWE was provided, I think one way to do this is to adapt the solution from Visualization in LaTeX of hamming distance which used the listings package and define a style that iterates over each character.

Each character is set in the width of the digit 0, and other properties can be adjusted based on the character, such as changing the color of the digits separately if you want. For normal math purposes you can just remove the color change code.

One problem that comes about is the leading spacing as TeX wants to gobble that up. For this, I adapted your solution by replacing a ~ with a space of the appropriate width. This only needs to be inserted for leading spaces. Any spaces after the first binary digit can just be a normal space (or a ~).

With this solution, the use of the \ttfamily is optional, since each digit (and space) is set to be the width of a 0, but the output looked the better with \ttfamily and the image shown reflects that.

Here is the modified version of your code:

\documentclass[twoside,english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}

\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{xcolor}% can remove this if you don't want color in output

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{2}
\setcounter{tocdepth}{2}

\newdimen\digitwidth%
\settowidth\digitwidth{0}%
\def~{\hspace{\digitwidth}}%
\def\divrule#1#2{%
\noalign{\moveright#1\digitwidth% 
\vbox{\hrule width#2\digitwidth}}}%

\newcommand*{\Resize}[1]{\makebox[\digitwidth]{#1}}%
\lstdefinestyle{BinaryNumber}{%
    literate={1}{\textcolor{blue}{\Resize{1}}}{1}%
             {0}{\textcolor{red}{\Resize{0}}}{1}%
             {,}{\Resize{\phantom{ }}}{1}%
             {\ }{\Resize{\phantom{ }}}{1},%
   basicstyle=\ttfamily,%  Optional to use this
}
\newcommand{\Binary}[1]{%
    \lstinline[style=BinaryNumber]{#1}%
}


\begin{document}
\Binary{10010}
\begin{tabular}[b]{@{}r@{}} 
\\ \hline 
\big|%
\begin{tabular}[t]{@{}l@{}} 
\Binary{1010 1111}\\ 
\Binary{1000 1000}\\ 
\divrule{0}{10} 
\Binary{,,,1 0000 1000} \\ 
\end{tabular} 
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

---

Old Solution:

Does this produces the results you ask for:

\documentclass{article} 
\begin{document}
With textt:
\texttt{\newline%
1010\newline
1000\newline
----\newline
0010\newline
}
\end{document} 

Answer 3

You have a couple of options here:

• Using a tabular; yes, this is possible:

  \documentclass{article}
  \begin{document}
  \begin{tabular}{*{4}{@{}c@{}}}% 4 centered columns without interspaced gaps
    1&0&1&0 \\
    1&0&0&0 \\ \hline
    0&0&1&0
  \end{tabular}
  \end{document}
  

  

  Extending this to incorporate more than just a 4-bit binary addition is also possible. Using the array package to define a new column type B, we have:

  \documentclass{article}
  \usepackage{array}% http://ctan.org/pkg/array
  \newcolumntype{B}{*{4}{@{}c@{}}}% One byte/4 bits
  \begin{document}
  \begin{tabular}{B@{~}B@{~}B@{~}B@{~}B}% 5 centered bytes with ~ as gaps
    1&0&1&0 & 1&1&1&1 & 1&1&1&1 & 1&1&1&1 & 0&0&0&0 \\
    1&0&0&0 & 1&0&0&0 & 0&0&0&1 & 0&0&0&0 & 1&1&0&1 \\ \hline
    0&0&1&1 & 1&0&0&0 & 0&0&0&0 & 1&1&1&1 & 1&1&0&1
  \end{tabular}
  \end{document}
  

  

• Or you could fix the character width by using a mono-spaced font:

  \documentclass{article}
  \begin{document}
  {\noindent\ttfamily
    1010 \\
    1000 \\
    ---- \\
    0010
  }
  \end{document}
  

  ​

  You could also use this mono-spaced in a tabular for better horizontal line representation, thereby combining the aforementioned examples:

  \documentclass{article}
  \begin{document}
  \ttfamily\begin{tabular}{@{}c@{}}
    1010 \\
    1000 \\ \hline
    0010
  \end{tabular}
  \end{document}
  

  

Similar extensions to larger binary additions are also possible for the last two examples that use mono-spaced \ttfamily.

Answer 4

I'm not sure what you want, so here's some suggestions.

Matrices

Maybe you'll be happy using matrices as in:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amsmath}

\begin{document}

\[
\begin{matrix}
  1 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\
  1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\
  \hline
  0 & 0 & 1 & 0
\end{matrix}
\]

\end{document}

If you want more options check out mathtools.

Verbatim

The following is probably not what you want and it's not pretty. The idea is just throw everything in verbatim.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{verbatim}

\begin{document}

\begin{verbatim}
1010
1000 
----
0010
\end{verbatim}

\end{document}