Include source code in Latex with “Listings”

 First include the “listings”-package into your document:

\usepackage{listings}

Basics

Now you have basically two possibilities. Either you type/copy your source code directly into the Latex document:

\begin{lstlisting}
place your source code here
\end{lstlisting}

The other possibility is to directly include the source file:

\lstinputlisting{filename.java}

This is particularly useful if you are still editing your source code. Obviously, Latex will always include the latest version of the source while generating the PDF-file.

Supported languages

The listings package does not only support java source code, but there is an exhaustive list of languages which are known to the package:
ABAP (R/2 4.3, R/2 5.0, R/3 3.1, R/3 4.6C, R/3 6.10), ACSL Ada (83, 95), Algol (60, 68), Ant, Assembler (x86masm), Awk (gnu, POSIX), bash, Basic (Visual), C (ANSI, Handel, Objective, Sharp), C++ (ANSI, GNU, ISO, Visual), Caml (light, Objective), Clean, Cobol (1974, 1985, ibm), Comal 80, csh, Delphi, Eiffel, Elan, erlang, Euphoria, Fortran (77, 90, 95), GCL, Gnuplot, Haskell, HTML, IDL (empty, CORBA), inform, Java (empty, AspectJ), JVMIS, ksh, Lisp (empty, Auto), Logo, make (empty, gnu), Mathematica (1.0, 3.0), Matlab, Mercury, MetaPost, Miranda, Mizar, ML, Modula-2, MuPAD, NASTRAN, Oberon-2, OCL (decorative, OMG), Octave, Oz, Pascal (Borland6, Standard, XSC), Perl,PHP, PL/I,Plasm, POV,Prolog, Promela,Python, R,Reduce, Rexx,RSL, Ruby, S (empty, PLUS), SAS, Scilab, sh, SHELXL, Simula (67, CII, DEC, IBM), SQL, tcl (empty, tk), TeX (AlLaTeX, common, LaTeX, plain, primitive), VBScript, Verilog, VHDL (empty, AMS), VRML (97), XML, XSLT.

Custom code formatting

You can customise the way how your code is displayed by using:

\lstset{...}


The following is a list of parameters, which can be used inside the previous command

language=Octave -> choose the language of the code
basicstyle=\footnotesize -> the size of the fonts used for the code
numbers=left -> where to put the line-numbers
numberstyle=\footnotesize -> size of the fonts used for the line-numbers
stepnumber=2 -> the step between two line-numbers.
numbersep=5pt -> how far the line-numbers are from the code
backgroundcolor=\color{white} -> sets background color (needs package)
showspaces=false -> show spaces adding particular underscores
showstringspaces=false -> underline spaces within strings
showtabs=false -> show tabs within strings through particular underscores
frame=single -> adds a frame around the code
tabsize=2 -> sets default tab-size to 2 spaces
captionpos=b -> sets the caption-position to bottom
breaklines=true -> sets automatic line breaking
breakatwhitespace=false -> automatic breaks happen at whitespace
morecomment=[l]{//} -> displays comments in italics (language dependent)

If you are using several parameters, they have to be separated by commas.
Example:

\lstset{numbers=left, stepnumber=2, frame=single,}


You might want to have a caption as well as reference the listing later:

\lstset{language=Java, caption=Descriptive Caption Text, label=DescriptiveLabel}


For an exhaustive list of available options to customize your included source code, refer to the documentation on CTAN.

Tricks

The following will draw a frame around your source code with a blue shadow (you will need the color-package).

\lstset{frame=shadowbox, rulesepcolor=\color{blue}}


If you want closed frames on each page, use the following command sequence:

\begin{framed}
\begin{lstlisting}...\end{lstlisting}
or \lstinputlisting{...}
\end{framed}


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Tags: code, LaTex, listings