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?

Christoph
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    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}} – David Carlisle May 30 '13 at 12:09
  • Is it just text you need to typeset, or will it be special characters like \\``,$,&`, etc.? – Steven B. Segletes May 30 '13 at 12:22
  • This sounds like you want formatting of keywords? It could be done using the listings package – cgnieder May 30 '13 at 12:24
  • The aim is to typeset examples from transcripts that were transcribed according to the Jeffersson notation (http://www.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 02 '13 at 18:17

1 Answers1

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

A.Ellett
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    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 02 '13 at 18:39
  • @Christoph did you find any efficient solution to this problem? – Czechnology Nov 22 '14 at 23:14
  • Have a look at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/39898/problem-with-underline-in-listings It uses the listings package, but that has functionality to enable this sort of markdown-esque formatting. – Rikki Feb 01 '17 at 22:25