What's the quickest way to write “2nd” “3rd” etc in LaTeX?

Question

If I want to use abbreviations for second, third and so on in my LaTeX documents, I am currently doing this: 2$^{nd}$ which seems unsatisfactory. Is there a macro I'm missing? I'm sure I could define one myself, and it would be fairly easy. But this looks like something that should already have been covered...

Answer 1

You should not use math, when it is normal text. Use \textsuperscript instead: 2\textsuperscript{nd}. You can also define a shortcut for this, e.g.

\newcommand{\ts}{\textsuperscript}

Then you could use 2\ts{nd} in the text.

Edit:
An even nicer solution is to load the package nth with the option super and use the \nth command:

\nth{1}, \nth{2}, \nth{3}, \nth{4}

Answer 2

I guess the quickest and easiest solution is to simply write "2nd", "3rd", etc.

Superscripts aren't really necessary.

Answer 3

An alternative to nth package is fmtcount.

In this case the command is \ordinalnum. By default the ordinal is formatted as superscript, but this is optional, as it is also in nth:

\usepackage{fmtcount} % equivalent to \usepackage[super]{nth}
\usepackage[level]{fmtcount} % equivalent to \usepackage{nth}

But there are some advantages over nth:

1. Limited multilingual support (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian). For example, in a Spanish document \nth{3} is formatted incorrectly as "3th" but \ordinalnum{3} is rendered correctly as "3º".

2. Optional gender. For example \ordinalnum{3}[f] produces in Spanish the feminine ordinal "3ª" (tercera). There is also a neuter option (n). By default the gender is m (masculine).

3. Is if possible switch between raise and level versions of ordinals in the same document (I can't imagine why, but who know!) with \fmtcountsetoptions{fmtord=raise} or \fmtcountsetoptions{fmtord=level}

4. For English-only users, obviously (1) and (2) features are useless, but the ftmcount package has also many other ordinal commands, as \ordinal{counter} or \ordinalstring{counter} to print a counter as section as an ordinal ("3th") or as textual ordinal ("third") and more.

A third package, engord, also print numbers (\engordnumber{12}), counters (\engord{page}) and can switch between styles with \engordraisetrue or \engordraisefalse, but there are not multilingual or gender support.

On the other hand, for enumerated lists you can use the moreenum package with the labels \raisenth or \levelnth. A MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{moreenum}
\begin{document}
\begin{enumerate}[label=\raisenth* --- ,start=1]
\item one
\item two
\item three
\end{enumerate}
\end{document}

Answer 4

If you are using ConTeXt MkIV, you can even imitate the automatic conversion of MS Word:

\usemodule[translate]
\translateinput[2nd][2\high{nd}]
\enableinputtranslation

\starttext
On the 2nd of November \unknown
\stoptext

This will translate all 2nd into 2\high{nd}.

Answer 5

If you're after speed when writing, this solution seems to be the quickest to type

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xspace}

\newcommand\nd{\textsuperscript{nd}\xspace}
\newcommand\rd{\textsuperscript{rd}\xspace}
\newcommand\nth{\textsuperscript{th}\xspace} %\th is taken already
\begin{document}
This is the 2\nd of December. Or the 4\nth of July. Or 3\rd place in a race.
\end{document}

The \xspace command intelligently decides whether there should be a space after the macro or not.