Boxes

The solid rectangle that Eplain uses as a marker in unordered lists (see section Lists) is available by itself: just say \blackbox.

You can create black boxes of arbitrary size with \hrule or \vrule.

You can also get unfilled rectangles with \makeblankbox. This takes two explicit arguments: the height and depth of the rules that define the top and bottom of the rectangle. (The two arguments are added to get the width of the left and right borders, so that the thickness of the border is the same on all four sides.) It also uses, as implicit arguments, the dimensions of \box0 to define the dimensions of the rectangle it produces. (The contents of \box0 are ignored.)

Here is an example. This small raised open box is suitable for putting next to numbers in, e.g., a table of contents.

\def\openbox{%
  \ht0 = 1.75pt \dp0 = 1.75pt \wd0 = 3.5pt
  \raise 2.75pt \makeblankbox{.2pt}{.2pt}
}

Finally, you can put a box around arbitrary text with \boxit. This takes one argument, which must itself be a (TeX) box, and puts a printed box around it, separated by \boxitspace white space (3 points by default) on all four sides. For example:

\boxit{\hbox{This text is boxed.}}

The reason that the argument must be a box is that when the text is more than one line long, TeX cannot figure out the line length for itself. Eplain does set \parindent to zero inside \boxit, since it is very unlikely you would want indentation there. (If you do, you can always reset it yourself.)

\boxit uses \ehrule and \evrule so that you can easily adjust the thicknesses of the box rules. See section Rules.

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