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Is there a way to emulate the behaviour of \widehat in text mode in Plain (Xe)TeX? That is, take a single accent1 and “stretch” it over two or more letters. I need it in text mode, because it's not for a mathematical formula.

I tried doing the same thing that \t does, but that didn't work, because (as I realized in the process) the tie-after is a character of its own, and it doesn't really stretch.

1 a circumflex for my current task, but I would be thankful to know if there is a more general mechanism.

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    The simplest would be \def\twidehat#1{$\widehat{\hbox{#1}}$} (you lose kerning information, but this always happens also with \accent).
    – egreg
    Jun 13, 2022 at 6:39

1 Answer 1

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You can use \widehat. This would work without problems with upright fonts, but some tweaking based on the font slant should be needed for slanted ones.

\catcode`@=11
\def\twidehat#1{$\m@th\widehat{\hbox{#1}}$}
\catcode`@=12

A\twidehat{c}cent

A\twidehat{cc}ent

A\twidehat{cce}nt

A\twidehat{ccen}t

{\it A\twidehat{cc}ent}

\bye

enter image description here

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  • Depending on the purpose of the macro, it could make sense to \smash it or at least do something in order not to create uneven line spacing.
    – Gaussler
    Jun 13, 2022 at 9:16

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