What are LaTeX “environments”

While TeX makes direct provision for commands, LaTeX adds a concept of “environment”; environments perform an action on a block (of something or other) rather than just doing something at one place in your document.

A totally trivial environment could change the font in use for a chunk of text, as

\newenvironment{monoblock}%
  {\ttfamily}%
  {}

which defines a monoblock which may be used as

\begin{monoblock}
  some text set in monospace
\end{monoblock}

which will look like: some text set in monospace so it is a particularly simple example. A rather complicated environment is introduced by \begin{document}; it looks simple, but needs all sorts of special TeX code to make it work “transparently”; most environments are more elaborate than monoblock and much simpler than document.

An environment puts its content inside a TeX group, so that commands used inside the environment don’t “leak out” — the monoblock environment, above, restricts its effect to its own contents (the stuff between the \begin{monoblock} and \end{monoblock}), which is just what you need for this sort of thing.

So that’s “simple” environments; the monoblock, above doesn’t actually gain us much over

{\ttfamily some text set in monospace}

though in fact many useful environments are just as simple (to look at). Some, such as verbatim, look simple but are actually very tricky inside.

LaTeX also allows arguments to an environment:

\newenvironment{fontblock}[1]%
  {#1\selectfont}%
  {}

and use of fontblock as:

\begin{fontblock}{\ttfamily}

would produce the same effect as the monoblock environment.

Environments may also have optional arguments, in much the same way as commands:

\newenvironment{normaltext}[1][\itshape]%
  {#1}%
  {}

which will ordinarily set its body in italic, but

\begin{normaltext}[\ttfamily]
  ...
\end{normaltext}

will observe its optional argument, and behave the same as the monoblock we started with.

Note that an environments argument(s) (mandatory or optional) are not passed to the \end text of the environment — that is specified as a macro with no arguments, so that

\newenvironment{normaltext}[1][\itshape]%
  {#1}%
  {\typeout{what was #1, again?}

produces an error message

! Illegal parameter number in definition of \endnormaltext.

So, if you need to pass an environment argument to the end-code, you have to wrap it in a macro of its own:

\newenvironment{normaltext}[1][Intro]%
  {#1%
   \newcommand{\foo}{#1}}%
  {\typeout{what was \foo{}, again?}

FAQ ID: Q-whatenv