At its core, LaTeX puts things in boxes and then puts the boxes on a page. So these commands are central.
There are many packages on CTAN that are useful for manipulating boxes. One useful adjunct to the commands here is adjustbox.
• \mbox & \makebox: | Horizontal boxes. | |
• \fbox & \framebox: | Put a frame around a box. | |
• \parbox: | Box with text in paragraph mode. | |
• \raisebox: | Raise or lower text. | |
• \sbox & \savebox: | Like \makebox but save the text for later.
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• lrbox: | Environment version of \sbox .
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• \usebox: | Print saved text. |