# \hat over italic letters is not centered horizontally

When using

$\hat{a}$


in LaTeX, the hat is actually aligned slightly left of the a's true head… Is there any common way to fix this?

As I think that this is a common issue, I didn't screenshot it, but if you want, let me know.

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Starting point for comparison:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
$\hat a$
\end{document}


The centering is better with other math fonts like mathptm:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{mathptmx}
\begin{document}
$\hat a$
\end{document}


\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{mathpazo}
\begin{document}
$\hat a$
\end{document}


Another variant is using the symbol from a text font, e.g. lmodern that matches the standard Computer Modern fonts for math:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\begin{document}
$\textit{\^a}$
\end{document}


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they all seem very fine. I'm currently using the beamer-class. So perhaps I should just change the font… –  Vincent Dec 9 '12 at 18:47