[texhax] TeX vs LaTeX primitives

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Mon, 30 Dec 2013 03:48:34 -0500 schrieb Victor Ivrii:

>> If you are using TeX primitives instead of LaTeX macros you certainly
>> lose parts of LaTeX's functionality.

> Reinhard's response raises in me 2 questions

> 1) In particular: I use very seldom hbox to avoid breakage of lines in
> multiline environment (f.e. in the title of the chapter) or  for some other
> exotic reasons (example below) when everything else I tried failed. What
> one can do instead?

\mbox or \makebox. The second has an optional argument to set the
width and another to set the alignment:  \makebox[0pt][l]{...}

For math there is also \mathllap, \mathmakebox etc from the
mathtools package. 

> 2) How in general distinguish truly LaTeX macros?

By looking in the code or the documentation. 


-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/