What is the difference between \hbox and \mbox?  What are these commands intended to do?  I cannot see what they do from my code alone without a word explanation...
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I've seen hbox, vbox, mbox, parbox and others used in various code samples. What are the different kinds of box in (La)Tex? Which are suitable for use in LaTeX, as opposed to plain TeX?
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When is it a good idea to use ?  I sometimes see this in code samples of PHP. Does this handle DOS/Mac/Unix endline issues?
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I don't know the correct answer how this reduction should've be done. Should I simply put λfx.fx in a place of m and λzy.zzy in a place of n?  (λmnfx.mf(nfx) λfx.fx λzy.zzy)
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In , the votes clearly show that the os.path.splitext function is preferred over the simple .split('.')[-1] string manipulation. Does anyone have a moment to explain exactly why that is? Is it faster, or more accurate, or what? I'm willing to accept that there's something better about it, but I can't immediately see what it might be. Might importing a whole module to do this be overkill, at least in simple cases?  EDIT: The OS specificity is a big win that's not immediately obvious; but even I should've seen the "what if there isn't a dot" case! And thanks to everybody for the general comments on library usage.
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I see this from time to time and want to know what it is. I did try google, but its filtering out the characters from the search. I have a few books that don't reference it either.   FWIW, I remember in pascal that is was the assignment operator.   Can anybody point me to the MSDN or similar page?
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I'm trying to use an \hbox to measure the dimensions of a certain text. This is working in normal text as in the following example: \setbox37=\hbox{this is a text that I want to measure} text width is \the\wd37, text heigh is \the\ht37\\ text contents: \box37  The output is correct as I expected: text width is 159.63913pt, text heigh is 6.94444pt text contents: this is a text that I want to measure However, when trying to do the same inside a TikZ environmnet, the box I'm using is not assigned the text I pass to \hbox, instead I gets empty box with zero width &amp; height. Here is the code: \begin{tikzpicture}   \setbox37=\hbox{this is a text that I want to measure}   \node[draw] at (0,0) {text width is \the\wd37, text heigh is \the\ht37};   \node[draw] at (0,-1) {text contents is \box37}; \end{tikzpicture}  And here is the output:  What am I missing here?
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What exactly do \csname and \endcsname do? What are their job? I have glanced at the Texbook and some other books, but none of them was clear enough to me. Can anyone please give a simple example to clarify this issue?
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Tried to add a comment to a post today, which ended up looking rather weird. What I had typed was:  On windows I believe you need to use `\` instead of `/`   As you can see in the first comment to this question, I don't exactly end up with what I thought I would... What's going on here?  Tried various combinations of double \\ and double `` (which seems to be impossible to have in an inline code thing...?), but couldn't get a good result. Ended up putting a space after the slash, which at least made it readable. Problem then was that the space between the inline code and the word "instead" seems to disappear O.o
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So I've read a few times about this, the “moving arguments” and all that. But what does it really mean? Could someone explain in a few words what is going on at the TeX level, what is the difference between these two kinds of commands? Furthermore, when do we need to use \protect and why?
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There is a well known  operator $\mbox{vec}$ in matrix analysis.   I've vectorized my matrix equations, did some transformation of vectorized  equations and now I want to get back to the matrix form. Is there special operator for it?
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Using the following command, could someone please explain what exactly is the purpose for the ending curly braces ({}) and plus sign (+)?  And how would the command operate differently if they were excluded from the command?  find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} +
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I once learnt, that it is uncool to use $$, but why is that? Why does \[ not act as a abbreviation to \begin{align}? I noticed, that there is a difference, since one cannot use &amp; and \\ inside a block started with \[.
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I have seen this syntax in MSDN: , but I don't know what it does.  Does anyone know?
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What is the difference between \emph{...} and {\em ...}?  When to use each of them?
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Here is a short file which produces an overfull hbox:  \documentclass[12pt]{report} \usepackage[left=1.5in,right=1in,paperwidth=8.5in,paperheight=11in]{geometry} \begin{document} \trivlist \item[\hskip\labelsep{\bf2.3.12 Corollary [Isomorphisms are indexed bijections]:}] Consider the functions $f$ and $g$ \endtrivlist \end{document}   If I replace functions with func-\linebreak tions, the word is split across two lines, resulting in neither an overfull nor an underfull hbox. However, neither func\-tions nor func-tions produces this behavior. Why not? Is there a better way to convince TeX that it's okay to hyphenate this word to prevent an overfull box?
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So far everything I found on the matter of borders only applies to the text mode.  I want to be able to do something like  $x_i = y$   so the result will be like the ordinary "xi = z" formula with the border around "i"?  The common answers seems to be the fbox or boxed commands. Yet they render their argument in the standart mode, unless specified to do otherwise with the specific mode. For example, the following code  \[ x_i, \boxed{x}_i, x_{\boxed{i}}, \boxed{x}_{\boxed{i}} \]   produces two normal xi figures, and another two with an oversized i.
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I have been using LaTeX for a long time now, and I find myself often going to this website to solve my problems. This often includes copy pasting codes which include \newcommand, \newenvironment and \def. I think it is time I start to learn how to use them so I can solve my problems myself! It is always better if you actually know what is going on inside your code.  I am wondering if there is any turtorial or book out there that handles how to use those commands. Or is the best way to learn to just mess with a random file?   Thanks in advance!  (Also this is my first time I post here after using this website for so long, I really appreciate everyone who posts and tries to help other people here!)