# Curly brace with a bar next to it

I'm trying to work out if there's a symbol for this, or if my hack will have to do.

What I'd like to achieve is a symbol identical to the curly braces with a bar here:

But the closest I can seem to get is this:

which clearly leaves a small space, as it's actually just

\{\!|\ Term\ |\!\}


I've tried to draw it into detexify but it's not come up with anything. (The top screenshot is from a LaTeX PDF, but I can't find the .tex file for it anywhere unsurprisingly.)

Any help or suggestions much appreciated!

• i know these are in the stix fonts, but don't remember the name, and it's not easy for me to check at the moment. they're definitely in unicode. – barbara beeton Jul 23 '15 at 10:12
• @barbarabeeton, according to stixfonts.org/allGlyphs.html it is 02983 5745 RU stixgeneral.otf ⦃ LEFT WHITE CURLY BRACKET and there are another 4 possible. – Sigur Jul 23 '15 at 10:24
• You can try with \{\kern-2pt|\ Term\ |\kern-2pt\} – Salim Bou Jul 23 '15 at 10:38
• @salimbou: thanks, that's perfect (well, I've changed it to -2.5pt and that looks about as good as I think it's going to be! Post this as an answer and I'll accept it, if nothing better is presented? – Savara Jul 23 '15 at 10:41
• @Savara Better use \mathopen{\{\mkern-10mu|} with whatever distance you choose. Using \mkern is alwas better than \kern because it scales well. In any case I would define a macro \specialset{ \textit{Term} }_{\textit{Term}}^{A} for instance. – Manuel Jul 23 '15 at 11:24

Here a simple MWE to obtain what you want

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand{\lbbar}{\{\kern-0.5ex|}
\newcommand{\rbbar}{|\kern-0.5ex\}}

\begin{document}

$\lbbar \ Term\ \rbbar^A_{Term}$

\end{document}


If you want to make yours brackets stretchable, you can use the scalerel package which provide \stretchleftright command, it can be used like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{scalerel}

\newcommand{\lbbar}{\{\kern-0.5ex|}
\newcommand{\rbbar}{|\kern-0.5ex\}}

\begin{document}

$\stretchleftright{\lbbar}{\displaystyle\sum_{i=1}^n i}{\rbbar}$

\end{document}


Which gives

• ex is a unit of vertical measure. much better to use a unit of horizontal measure (em, or mu in math). while many fonts are "square" (uniformly sized in both directions), some aren't (like computer modern bold), and they will scale differently when placed into a subscript, for example. – barbara beeton Jul 24 '15 at 4:47