Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jarthur!mimir.claremont.edu!dhosek
From: dhosek@mimir.claremont.edu (Don Hosek)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Need non-fixed-width parbox in LaTeX
Message-ID: <1990Dec11.094121.1@mimir.claremont.edu>
Date: 11 Dec 90 17:41:21 GMT
References: <1568@abekrd.UUCP>
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 28

In article <1568@abekrd.UUCP>, garyb@abekrd.UUCP (Gary Bartlett) writes:
> I need to format a piece of text in a parbox (because I need to specify
> where the line breaks are to occur) but I want the final box to be only as
> wide as the largest line of text.  I cannot figure out how to achieve this.
 
> eg - the text to be formatted:
 
> 	this is line 1 \\
> 	this is a longer line 2 \\
> 	the end
 
> I will always specify where the line breaks are to occur so I don't need
> LaTeX to split the lines for me. Theoretically therefore, I don't need to
> specify a width. Unfortunately, \parbox demands a width. I don't know the
> width of the longest line before hand either. Can anyone see a way around
> this?

\newenvironment{centerlongestline}{\begin{center}\begin{minipage}{\linewidth}
   \begin{tabbing}}{\end{tabbing}\end{minipage}\end{center}}

See the LaTeX manual under the tabbing environment for an
explanation of why this works.

Another alternative would be to use \begin{tabular}{l} ...
\end{tabular} rather than a tabbing environment, in which case
the minipage environment could be omitted entirely.

-dh