I hesitate to argue with such an eminent authority but I've been using
customised alltt (not verbatim) environments in LaTeX for years and
never had any problems at all. One of the main reasons I'm using alltt
rather than verbatim is that I want to change the font characteristics
inside the environment. The actual env I used that showed up the
problem is something like
\newenvironment{doutput}{\begin{alltt}\bfseries\sffamily\color{firebrick4}}{\end{alltt}\\}
This works perfctly well in LaTeX.
Graham
