Creating a figure consisting of text

Question

I am writing a technical report related to text processing and would like to use a figure to illustrate something like what is shown in figure 1 below.

So basically, it is just a figure with text. As I wan't to keep the "latex-look" in the entire document, I would prefer not doing it as I have done in this example (e.g. using notepad).

I am sorry for not providing a minimal working example, but I could not figure out what to search for other than e.g. "latex figures with text". This only results in descriptions on how to create figure captions.

So basically what I am asking for is guidance on how to do this, or what to search for.

Also, if someone knows if this is a proper way of illustrating what I am trying to do (like you see in the example figure) when it comes to academic reports, I would appreciate your input. I assume this would be preferable rather than just writing the lists of strings and integers (as in this example) out in raw text.

Answer 1

Following solution combines several "tricks":

First, all codes snippets are inside a figure environment. This enables you to use a caption. The later will say something : Figure 1. Caption content (Figure because the caption has been defined in a... figure environment!).

Then, we use subfigure environments to put several elements side-by-side. Using the package subcaption enables you to define a \caption inside each subfigure environment and thus add... a sub-caption.

Lastly, one use the listings package for displaying code within lstlisting environments. Beware: because code is printed alike verbatim, you should "reset" indentation inside lstlisting environments. Centering code snippets is not trivial. For that we make a detour, include lstlisting inside one-cell tabular, as explained in How to center a listing?.

---

\documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{subcaption}
    \usepackage{listings}
        \lstset{basicstyle=\ttfamily}
    \usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
    \lipsum[1]
    \begin{figure}[htb]
        \centering
        \begin{subfigure}[t]{.5\linewidth}
            \centering
            \begin{tabular}{c}
% Don't indent the lstlisting environment!          
\begin{lstlisting}
[
  'foo',
  'bar',
  'baz',
]
\end{lstlisting}
             \end{tabular}
             \caption{Simply words}
        \end{subfigure}%
        \begin{subfigure}[t]{.5\linewidth}
            \centering
            \begin{tabular}{c}
\begin{lstlisting}
[
  3,
  2,
  1,
]
\end{lstlisting}
            \end{tabular}
            \caption{And numbers here}
        \end{subfigure}
        \caption{Very code. Much geek. Wow!}
    \end{figure}
    \lipsum[2]
\end{document}