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. |