Subscript spacing

Question

I have a question similiar to the post: How to change default for spacing around binary relations?. In particular, I would like to make subscripts look less cramped. According to another post (Increase the space between operator in subscript/superscript), there doesn't appear to be a good way to do this. Currently, I do the following (more or less what the author in the second referenced post suggests).

\documentclass{article}
    \newcommand{\ts}[1]{\, #1 \,}

\begin{document}

\[
    \sum_{i \ts{=} 1}^{n} a_{i}
\]

\end{document}

However, the \ts command makes the LaTeX harder to read. Does anyone have any ideas about how to get the desired spacing while keeping the LaTeX simple? Ideally, I would just write the following:

\[
    \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_{i}
\]

but get some extra space around the equals sign in the subscript of the summation.

Answer 1

I'm not convinced this is a good idea but you could do something like

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\renewcommand\sb[1]{_\text{$#1$}}

\begin{document}

\[
    \sum_{i = 1}^{n} a_{i}
\]
\[
    \sum\sb{i = 1}^{n} a_{i}
\]

\end{document}

Here I've redefined the standard command \sb which by default does the same as _, you could go further and redefine _ but history shows that if you do that usually you end up breaking something.