The \left
and \right
commands often produce improvidently large delimiters. It almost always looks better to use delimiters that are just slightly too small than delimiters that are too large. With computer modern, the results are usually bearable, but with (for example) the mathdesign
package using charter font, the delimiter sizing is intolerable. For instance, the following code produces vertical bars around y that are much larger than x:
\documentclass{amsart}
\usepackage[charter]{mathdesign}
\begin{document}
It would be nice if these were the same size:
\[ \left|x\right| \quad \left|y\right| \]
It would be even better if
\[\left|x^{2^3}\right| \quad \text{ looked like } \quad \bigl| x^{2^3}\bigr|\]
\end{document}
An image of the result:
So now the question: Any ideas on how to produce sloppy \left
and \right
commands (say, \sleft
and \sright
) that allows a little bit of overhang?
`
to mark your inline code as I did in my edit.\big
(and friends). Also,scalerel
might be what you're after.\big
, etc., are good for tuning a final draft. But\left
and\right
should get me within the ballpark so that most equations don't need fine tuning. That's the whole point of these commands, no?\left
and\right
give clearly wrong size (sometimes too big, sometimes too small). IMHO, their main use is for delimiters bigger than\Bigg...
. Equations will need tuning if you want them too look good anyway.