Someone raised this old (but good) question, so I might as well mention an alternative. You can use ISO-style bold italic vectors instead of an arrow.
In PDFLaTeX, you can do this with the isomath
package.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{amsmath, amssymb, isomath, bm}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\[ a \cdot \vectorsym{p}' \times \vectorsym{p}'' \]
\end{document}

In LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX, you would use unicode-math
.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\pagestyle{empty}
\newcommand\vectorsym[1]{\symbfit{#1}}
\begin{document}
\[ a \cdot \vectorsym{p}' \times \vectorsym{p}'' \]
\end{document}

If you want a bolder prime symbol to match the vector symbol, you can define
\newcommand\boldprime{\boldsymbol{'}}
For this to work in unicode-math
, you must load a math font that comes in bold, or \setmathfont
with .[version=bold]
.
\renewcommand\vec\mathbf
in the pre-amble, and\vec{p}'
in the document. – Niel de Beaudrap Jun 19 '13 at 16:15\vec{p}^{\, \prime}
, but it still doesn't look right. Maybe I'm overthinking this... Possibly decreasing the size of the prime would be an option, while increasing the spacing. – Bernd Jun 19 '13 at 16:19\vec{p}^{\,\prime}
looks alright myself; but I suppose it depends on precisely what you want to achieve with it. Do beware overthinking it though. – Niel de Beaudrap Jun 19 '13 at 16:26