# Tag Info

2

Although this question is quite old and has very good answers, I think that maybe there are other people as type-lazy as me, who might appreciate my approach. Edit: In response to egreg's comments, I wanted to adapt my answer - but the proposed changes would mean that the answer coincides with Nathanael Farley's answer, except for the fact that I redefined ...

19

When TeX assembles the various "atoms" of a formula into a whole (a "molecule", if you will), it mainly keeps track of each atom's enclosing rectangular "box", and it arranges the boxes horizontally and vertically according to the rules listed in Appendix G of the TeXbook. In the process of arranging the boxes, TeX doesn't actually "know" what's inside each ...

20

The following image shows the boxes of each character as seen by tex, for each of the cases in egreg's answer. You can clearly see how the boxes of the parenthesis are "too wide", which causes the exponent to be too far. In addition, using egreg's suggestion (\biggl() removes unwanted space before the box of the left parenthesis. Note For generating the ...

20

This is a case where manual adjustment is needed. The coloring has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the shape of the parenthesis, which is quite wide. I'd recommend using \biggl and \biggr, in particular because of the coefficient in front of the open parenthesis. \documentclass{article} \usepackage{xcolor} \begin{document} ...

0

Your problem is not arising due to the citation, but only stems from the uses of superscripts. Whenever superscripts are used, they are intended to be short. Hence line breaks are neither nice nor possible. The technical reason for this is, that LaTeX will wrap the text given in \superscript{} into a box, which is the raised. This box is the treated like ...

3

One could define a macro called, say, \supsub, that takes two arguments -- the repeated material that goes in the superscripts and subscripts, resp. One or the other argument or even both arguments may be empty. \documentclass{article} % exploit the fact that \null is defined as '{}' \newcommand{\supsub}[2]{ a \if#1\null\else^{#1}\fi ...

3

How's this? \documentclass[12pt]{article} \usepackage{ifthen} \newcommand{\exponent}[2] {% \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{^}}% {a^{#2}b^{#2}c^{#2}}% {\ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{_}}% {a_{#2}b_{#2}c_{#2}}% {\message{## Warning: exponent command misused ##}#1#2}% }} \begin{document} Here is the exponent command: ...

2

These symbols remind of footnote symbols, which following this sequence: (1) *, (2), \dagger, (3) \ddagger, (4), \mathsection, (5) \mathparagraph, (6) \|, (7) **, (8) \dagger\dagger and (9) \ddagger\ddagger. You'll notice this sequence when viewing the definition of \@fnsymbol (from latex.ltx): \def\@fnsymbol#1{\ensuremath{\ifcase#1\or *\or \dagger\or ...

2

If there is no prevailing convention, just go ahead and use whatever you want. After all, you only need to introduce it stringently so it's clear from your notation what you want to show. From a readability point of view, it's best to use symbols not easily confused with others. Have a look at the list of LaTeX symbols. Me personally, I'd have a look in Tab. ...

0

\dagger There are others available in the same family.

5

As more than three powers get very unpleasant to read, I would really recommend using another notation. As already proposed in the comments (hence a community wiki answer), you can represent power towers by the arrow notation: (x\uparrow\uparrow10) You might want to watch Numberphiles YouTube video about Grahams number to understand this notation. This ...

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