I find that $\tilde{x} produces a tilde that is much too small for legibility at the screen resolution I normally use for reading. On my screen it looks like a tiny bar above the symbol. This question asked how to generate a larger tilde over a particular wide character (a mathcal W), presumably with the motivation of making the tilde look better matched in size with this large glyph. The answer by Ant provides a couple of methods, which look good for wide characters but bad for narrow ones. Example:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
\newcommand{\tildea}[1]{\overset{\sim}{#1}}
\newcommand{\tildeb}[1]{\stackrel{\sim}{\smash{#1}\rule{0pt}{1.1ex}}}
$\tilde{W} \quad \tildea{W} \quad \tildeb{W}$
$\tilde{I} \quad \tildea{I} \quad \tildeb{I}$
\end{document}
Results:
To me the larger tildes over the "I" look like they're way off in terms of horizontal positioning. Is there a way to make a macro that automagically gets this horizontal positioning right, as the \tilde macro seems to do? I would like to avoid having different macros for characters of different widths.
\widetilde? – egreg Jan 22 at 16:31