# mathpazo superscripts too close for certain letters

With the mathpazo package, which sets text and mathematics in Palatino font, the superscripts are too close to the letters that they are attached to, particularly if these letters are v,w,z as in $w^d,w^i,w^1,w^2,w^3,v^d,v^i,v^1,v^2,v^3,z^j$ which produces this picture:

and I would hope that there is a general way to shift superscripts to the right, given that the Palatino italics letters are probably more slanted than is normally assumed in math mode.

• Do you have tried with the correct mode w^{d}? – Sebastiano Mar 16 at 17:05
• This is irrelevant because it just affects how TeX processes the input, and braces are not necessary for single symbols. But thanks for your next suggestion! – Bernhard von Stengel Mar 17 at 0:19

You could to try with a clone of Palatino (for example) with the two packages newpxtext and newpxmath. I have not your example into your question.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{newpxtext,newpxmath}
\begin{document}
$w^{d}, w^{i}, v^{1}$
\end{document}


• Excellent suggestion. \usepackage{newpxtext,newpxmath} has also shorter equality signs that take some getting used to, but better spacing and better large parentheses, see my answer where I can add pictures: – Bernhard von Stengel Mar 17 at 0:20

As suggested by Sebastiano, \usepackage{newpxtext,newpxmath} seems an improvement over \usepackage{mathpazo} with much better spacing but also a different look. Compare \usepackage{mathpazo}

and \usepackage{newpxtext,newpxmath}

with its better spacing and parentheses but also different equality, plus, and minus signs =,+,-.

A similar improvement is from \usepackage{mathptmx} which has terribly sized Greek letters to \usepackage{newtxtext,newtxmath} for Times (rather than Palatino as discussed here).