Bold italic vectors

Question

I am trying to display vectors as bold and italic. The command \mathbf sets the letters non-italic. I also googled a bit and stumbled upon \mathbf{\em y} or \mathbfit{y}, which all didn't work.

I hope someone can help me on this.

Answer 1

It depends on the math font, but the bm package can handle most of them. The usage is then $\bm{y}$

Answer 2

The answer depends on the math fonts you are actually using. For the standard fonts and as long as you use only letters and numbers this should work:

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\DeclareMathAlphabet      {\mathbfit}{OML}{cmm}{b}{it}

\begin{document}
$a=\mathbfit{a}$
\end{document}