Box commands and colour

Even if you do not intend to use colour in your own documents, by taking note of the points in this section you can ensure that your class or package is compatible with the color package. This may benefit people using your class or package who have access to colour printers. The simplest way to ensure `colour safety' is to always use L^ATEX box commands rather than TEX primitives, that is use \sbox rather than \setbox, \mbox rather than \hbox and \parbox or the minipage environment rather than \vbox. The L^ATEX box commands have new options which mean that they are now as powerful as the TEX primitives. As an example of what can go wrong, consider that in {\ttfamily <text>} the font is restored just before the }, whereas in the similar looking construction {\color{green} <text>} the colour is restored just after the final }. Normally this distinction does not matter at all; but consider a primitive TEX box assignment such as:

   \setbox0=\hbox{\color{green} <text>}

Now the colour-restore occurs after the } and so is not stored in the box. Exactly what bad effects this can have depends on how colour is implemented: it can range from getting the wrong colours in the rest of the document, to causing errors in the dvi-driver used to print the document. Also of interest is the command \normalcolor. This is normally just \relax (i.e., does nothing) but you can use it rather like \normalfont to set regions of the page such as captions or section headings to the `main document colour'.