<html><body><div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div data-marker="__QUOTED_TEXT__"><div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div>Thanks for the helpful responses.<br></div><br><div>The combination of \scriptstyle, \scriptscriptstyle, and \mathtt{} seems to work equivalently, as long as the characters are all letters or digits. But what can be placed between the delimiters of \verb| ... | and what can be placed inside a \mathtt{ ... } are not the same, and I'm pretty sure the characters inside \mathtt{ ... } are more restricted.<br></div><br><div>My problem is that I don't have control over the characters I want to be verbatimed; they are coming from somewhere else and being inserted into the LaTeX document. And I definitely want to be able to use a piece of verbatim text as a superscript or a subscript, and yes I know that's not the "right" thing for a math formula, except that in what I'm doing, it really is.<br></div><br><div>So the following all seem to do what I want, and there are no LaTeX warnings or errors:<br></div><br><div>\documentclass{letter}<br>\begin{document}<br><br>\verb|box7|<br><br>$\hbox{\verb|box7|}$<br><br>{\setbox7=\hbox{\verb|box7|}$\box7$}<br><br>{\setbox7=\hbox{\scriptsize \verb|box7|}$2^{\box7}$}<br><br>{\setbox7=\hbox{\tiny \verb|box7|}$2^{2^{\box7}}$}<br><br>\end{document}<br><br></div><div>The second example works but is questionable according to previous responses. Are there downsides for the other examples that build the verbatim text in a box first, outside of math mode?<br></div><br><div>Doug McKenna<br></div><div>Mathemaesthetics, Inc.<br></div><br><div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><br></blockquote></div></div></div><br></div></div></body></html>