# line break inside cases environment

I have an equation using a cases environment, with one case with a long description text:

\begin{eqnarray*}
\begin{cases}
1 \text{too long description of the first case,
not fitting on the page}\\
0 \text{shorter description}
\end{cases}
\end{eqnarray*}


The text of the first case is cut of, as it is too long for my page width.

How can I let LaTeX split the line? Using a matrix does not seem like a clean solution to me...

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Better avoid eqnarray. – Stefan Kottwitz Jan 19 '12 at 13:29

You could use \parbox with top alignment:

\begin{equation*}
\begin{cases}
1 & \parbox[t]{.6\textwidth}{too long description of the first case,
not fitting on the page}\\
0 & \text{shorter description}
\end{cases}
\end{equation*}


Further, better avoid the old eqnarray environment. Use align or another multi-line displayed math environment of amsmath. Here, even simply equation* or $...$ would be sufficient, since it's a single line, and also doesn't need alignment. cases within is multi-line, but that doesn't matter for the outer environment.

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thanks, this works well. I changed it to an align environment too (there are more lines in the document, I reduced it for asking here) – crater2150 Jan 23 '12 at 11:54