Text Formatting ⇒ Coloring Paragraph fails

[Hans Nieuwenhuis]

Hi,

I have a 'questions and answers' section in my document. I want the answers to be formatted in a special way: italics and blue text.

Example document:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper,pdftex]{report}
\usepackage{xcolor}

\newcommand{\answer}[1]{\textcolor{blue}{\textit{#1}}}

\begin{document}

\answer{
First sentence of answer.

Second sentence of answer.

\begin{enumerate}
  \item Item 1

  \item Item 2
\end{enumerate}
}

\end{document}

If I use simple text (no begin{enumerate}, no empty lines), this solution works.

But if I try to typeset this document using pdfLatex, I get the following error message:

Code: Select all

Runaway argument?
{\textit { First sentence of answer. 
! Paragraph ended before \@textcolor was complete.
<to be read again> 
                   \par 
l.20 }

I can solve this by placing a '\\' on the empty line between First sentence of answer and Second sentence of answer.

I also place a '\\' between Second sentence of answer and \begin{enumerate}.

However, then I get the following error message:

Code: Select all

Runaway argument?
{\textit { First sentence of answer. \\ Second sentence of answer. \\\ETC.
! Paragraph ended before \@textcolor was complete.
<to be read again> 
                   \par 
l.20 }

If I remove the

Code: Select all

\begin{enumerate}
  \item Item 1

  \item Item 2
\end{enumerate}

part, everything works fine.

How can I color all text which might be part of the argument to the \answer command?

[localghost]

This can't work. The logical approach would be to create an appropriate environment for blue and italicized text. For a final solution it could be helpful to see what you are after. Can you provide a visual example (sketch, scan, excerpt from other document)? At the moment all I see is something like this that would appear in the output.

First sentence of answer.
Second sentence of answer.

1. Item 1
2. Item 2

If you are going to write exercises and their respective solutions, there would be some packages or classes which support this.


Thorsten

[Hans Nieuwenhuis]

I want exactly to produce what you are showing (the text in blue color and italic font).

I'm not making a 'questions and answers' section for a test/exam or so. There are no multiple answers a user has to choose from.

I will try to do something with an environment and let you know the results.

[localghost]

So this is the easiest method I can imagine.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{xcolor}

\newenvironment{answer}{%
   \setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
   \itshape
   \color{blue}
}{}

\begin{document}
  \begin{answer}
    First sentence of answer.

    Second sentence of answer.
    \begin{enumerate}
      \item Item 1
      \item Item 2
    \end{enumerate}
  \end{answer}
\end{document}

[Hans Nieuwenhuis]

Yes, that works.

Thanks!