mjhjmtu

I want to add a box with a very light pink background and red border around a word but inline and within a sentence.

i.e. something like this (drawn with inkscape)

I know the mdframed package can be used for placing boxes around paragraphs, but it does not seem to work inline and also give colored boxes.

Possibly TikZ is a solution? From the little I know of TikZ, it can be used to draw pictures inline inside a sentence.

Yes, it is possible with TikZ. You can do this in two ways:

• by including the code directly in the text.


• by creating a LaTeX command named autour which contains the TikZ code.

Here is an example of two possibilities that have different parameters in order to visually show their effects.

documentclassarticle
usepackagetikz
newcommandautour[1]tikz[baseline=(X.base)]node [draw=red,fill=gray!40,semithick,rectangle,inner sep=2pt, rounded corners=3pt] (X) #1;

begindocument

Quick brown fox tikz[baseline=(X.base)]node [draw=black,fill=cyan!20,thick,rectangle,inner sep=3pt, rounded corners=4pt] (X) jumped; over the lazy dog.
bigskip

Quick brown fox autourjumped over the lazy dog.
enddocument

This is a bit similar to AndréC's answer but to point out that there so some extent tikzmarknode, which comes with the really cool tikzmark library, got reinvented. And tikzmark allows you to do much more, of course.

documentclassarticle
usepackagetikz
usetikzlibrarytikzmark

begindocument

section*Some basic examples

The quick brown fox tikzmarknode[draw,inner sep=2pt,rounded corners,fill=cyan!30]Ajumped over the lazy dog.

bigskip

The quick brown fox tikzmarknode[draw,inner sep=2pt,rounded corners,fill=red!30]Bjumped over the lazy dog.

section*Some more elaborate examples

As it is well known,
[ sumlimits_tikzmarknode[rounded corners,fill=blue!30,inner sep=1pt]k1k=1^infty
k~=~-frac112;,]
where $tikzmarknode[rounded corners,fill=blue!30,inner sep=2pt]k2k$ is a summation index.

tikz[overlay,remember picture]draw[latex-latex] (B) to[bend left] (A);
draw[latex-latex] (k1) to[bend right] (k2);

enddocument