# [texhax] Strange behaviour of size of parenthesis using lmodern

Morten Høgholm morten.hoegholm at gmail.com
Mon Jul 30 11:52:02 CEST 2007

On Mon, 30 Jul 2007 06:25:23 +0200, Chris Rowley <C.A.Rowley at open.ac.uk>
wrote:

> =?iso-8859-15?Q?Morten_H=F8gholm?= wrote --
>>
>> You should report this as a bug to the Latin Modern authors.
>
> Or maybe as an inelegance in the design: better or worse than a bug?

In CMR the numbers are not strictly inside the bounding box and the same
is the case in LM - except for 4 and 7 where the bounding box has been
extended so that the character is contained in the top (but not the bottom
for 7).

Running this example with and then without lmodern shows it quite clearly:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\begin{document}
\setlength\fboxsep{0pt}\setlength\fboxrule{1sp}
\fbox{$\scriptstyle 2$}\fbox{$\scriptstyle 4$}
\fbox{$\scriptstyle 6$}\fbox{$\scriptstyle 7$}
\end{document}

Quick tests show that for many of the fonts in LM, figures have different
heights. In sans serif for example, 4,5 and 7 are smaller than the rest
and for bold math only 7 is bigger than the rest.

I would certainly be a little perplexed finding I would get different
sized fences depending on whether I was talking about R^3 or R^4 and its
the kind of thing which would prevent me from using it in production.

--
Morten