# Adding vertical padding to characters in math

This is my first post here, so please bear with me.

I'm writing a dissertation with a heavily modified version of the book cls. This dissertation is very equation-heavy. I'm writing vectors in boldface and with a vector hat (yes, I know that it may seem redundant, but there are notation issues between proper vectors and certain tensors). In doing this, however, my vector arrows are a bit too low (vertically), so that they run into my characters:

My question is this: can I either manually move the vector arrow upward, or add artificial whitespace to the top of the character (and how do I go about doing that)?

_

Here's a quick MWE. I imagine the documentclass doesn't matter too terribly much, so I went with an article. I don't know if all of these packages are necessary for a MWE (I suspect they aren't), but I do use them in my dissertation, and I understand that sometimes packages interfere with one another, so I included them.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{mathspec}
\setmathsfont(Digits,Latin,Greek)[Numbers={Proportional}]{TeX Gyre Termes}
\setmathrm{EB Garamond}

\begin{document}

$\mathbf{\vec{N}}$

\end{document}


Neither of these is quite what I'm looking for, though, I'm afraid. I'd like to move the vector arrow upwards a bit if there's a way to do so.

• \mathbf will not act on \vec it should be \vec {\mathbf{N}}. With \usepackage{bm} and $\bm{\vec{N}}$ one obtains a better result. Besides on my installation I have a EBGaramond12-Regular.otf file but apparently no bold variant, and \mathbf{N} is thus the same as \mathrm{N}, hence your mwe can not be tested as is. Finally, your question includes an image, but this does not correspond to your mwe. – user4686 Jan 22 '16 at 8:28
• Sorry, but mixing Times and Garamond is something very near to blasphemy. ;-) – egreg Jan 22 '16 at 11:47
• jfbu: I'm sorry for the image not corresponding to the MWE. I suppose it would have been better to make a vector N for the image, but it shouldn't make much of a difference, right? Either way, I did try both, and I've added the results to my original post. For the text portion, I've removed the '\' because I honestly don't know how to write it as an escaped character. – Fire Jan 25 '16 at 17:09
• egreg: I was completely and blissfully unaware of this. Sorry! I'd used Times for math because of the boldface issue, but it looked so dark for the body text. I've since messed with using Garamond URW for bold headings, but I haven't switched for math font. Should I do so? – Fire Jan 25 '16 at 17:13
• @Fire If you need boldface, don't use Garamond. It's like having a Formula1 race instead of horses in Ben Hur. ;-) – egreg Jan 25 '16 at 17:21