Question

Maybe there is a package to do this, but I have not been able to find it. If it doesn’t exist, I would appreciate ideas as to how to do ithis. Basically, I need something that would box characters. Something like this:

-------
| A| L|
-  -  - ...
| 2| 3|
-------

Knuth has something like this in TAOCP, when he discusses MIX’s word… without the bottom part, though.

So, a character, and some other char or chars below. Any idea? (I’m foreseeing a tumbleweed)…

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use \raisebox to fix the vertical height. See the example at the end of this discussion of boxes. Since you can put boxes inside boxes, I think something like this is the answer (gives me a something that looks like your example).

Some text.
\framebox[1.1\width][s]{
    \parbox[b]{7.2ex}{
        \raisebox{2.0ex}{
            \framebox[1.6\width][s]{A}
            \framebox[1.6\width][s]{L}
        }
        \raisebox{0ex}{
            \framebox[1.6\width][s]{2}
            \framebox[1.6\width][s]{3}
        }
    }
}
Some more text.