0

Right now I've got commands defined in my preamble that abbreviate \mathbf. For example, instead of writing \mathbf{F} every time I want to write F, I've simply defined a new command \def\F{\ensuremath{\mathbf{F}}} so I can write F more easily as \F.

Thing is, I'm doing this for lots of letters and it would be much nicer if I could cover the whole alphabet in one or two commands.

So is there something like \def\[lowercase]{\ensuremath{\mathbf{[lowercase]}}} where whenever I write \ followed by a lowercase letter it will compile that lowercase letter in bold?

It's not really a big deal having several similar commands in the preamble as I can just copy and paste and change accordingly, but it would be nice to have something more concise.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Improve this question
2

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

This declares a command for each lowercase letter in the alphabet. Existing commands are overwritten, which might be a problem as @DavidCarlisle mentions in the comments.

\documentclass{article}

\ExplSyntaxOn
\clist_map_inline:nn {a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z} {
    \exp_args:Nc \DeclareDocumentCommand {#1} {} {\ensuremath{\mathbf{#1}}}
}
\ExplSyntaxOff

\begin{document}
\a \f \n \h \z
\end{document}

enter image description here

Improve this answer
3
  • a,b,c,d,h,i,k,l,o,r,u,v are all standard latex commands, typsetting a bibliography with non english names will produce weird results after such a definition.
    – David Carlisle
    Jun 27, 2022 at 22:10
  • @DavidCarlisle Would you link to something explaining a bit more about core commands? I had never used \[lowercase] for anything until I wanted to use it for bold, so I was unaware that it would be overriding anything. (I didn't get any error messages when I used the new commands, so...)
    – GibbNotGibbs
    Jun 28, 2022 at 9:36
  • 1
    @GibbNotGibbs \c for example is cedilla \c{c} is ç even if you use inputenc and enter abç latex first normalises this to ab\c{c} then this will produce abcc with no warning, so basically if your document is not in English, or even if it is in English but your bibliography references any person or title with an accented letter, latex is fudamentally broken by these definitions. The fact that you get no error using these commands is the problem not a sign that everything is OK.
    – David Carlisle
    Jun 28, 2022 at 11:00

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .