Writing verbatim inside verbatim

More strange problems, still teaching LaTeX. So I wanted to teach people how to get text or code formatted exactly as they type it with the verbatim environment. This is the part of code I wanted to use as an example:

\begin{verbatim}
text inside a      verbatim environment
is printed \emph{exactly} as     you\\
type      it ! % no comment!
\end{verbatim}

What I usually do is I have a block that shows the code they have to write and then the result. And of course for showing the code they need to write, I use verbatim. So can you include verbatim inside verbatim?

Well, yes you can, but of course you cannot include \end{verbatim}, as this would be interpreted as ending the verbatim environment. So I had to add this separately afterwards, using \verb (inline verbatim). Voila:

\begin{block}{What you write}
\begin{verbatim}
\begin{verbatim}
text inside a      verbatim environment
is printed \emph{exactly} as     you\\
type      it ! % no comment!
\end{verbatim}
\verb|\end{verbatim}|
\end{block}

Now there’s only a small problem, namely that there is some spacing after the environment, so it seems like there is an empty line between the end of the verbatim text and the \end{verbatim}. For this example it doesn’t matter, I use it to show them that empty lines are also printed exactly as they are given.

But next example is how to include verbatim inside a beamer frame. The example code I wanted to show inside the usual verbatim environment:

\begin{frame}[fragile]
   \begin{verbatim}
      test
   \end{verbatim}
\end{frame}

So you see that here I don’t really want an empty line between \end{verbatim} and \end{frame}. So my final hacky solution jumped back up over that space after the environment:

\begin{block}{What you write}
\begin{verbatim}
\begin{frame}[fragile]
   \begin{verbatim}
      test
\end{verbatim}
\vspace{-0.9\baselineskip}
\verb|   \end{verbatim}|\\
\verb|\end{frame}|
\end{block}

Which works fine, but the more easy solution is probably this one (or use lstlisting or any other code-environment):

\begin{block}{What you write}
\verb|\begin{frame}[fragile]|\\
\verb|   \begin{verbatim}|\\
\verb|      test|\\
\verb|   \end{verbatim}|\\
\verb|\end{frame}|
\end{block}

Writing accents and quotes that look like accents and quotes in LaTeX

I had a very strange problem. In my slides for teaching LaTeX I wanted to tell people that they have to write ``test'' to get “test” (in correct quotes). But if you write ` in LaTeX, you get… a single quote sign! So I tried verbatim, \verb|`| and \texttt{`} – which all gives something that looks like a LaTeX quote sign.

After quite some frustration I found the following:

\`{} gives ` (grave accent)
\'{} curiously gives ´ (acute accent)

The straight quote is the hardest, after reading about many creative ways at stackexchange, I chose the easiest: Include package textcomp. Then

\textquotesingle gives ' (single straight quote)

What a mess!