# [texhax] Description: \lbrace \rbrace

Donald Arseneau asnd at triumf.ca
Sun Nov 15 01:00:26 CET 2009

"P. R. Stanley" <prstanley at ntlworld.com> writes:

> >\langle and \rangle are the tex angle brackets;
> >they are shallower than < and > and can be
> >sized with \left and \right.
>
>          Paul: First of all, BB, thanks for your reply. Could you explain
> what you mean by "shallow"? To extend the angle analogy, are they acute or
> obtuse and, what effect do \left and \right achieve in this context? I was
> under the impression that they matched the height of the brackets with that
> of of the tallest object within.

Being a type of bracket, the angle of \langle and \rangle is obtuse.
The angle of < (\lt) and > (\gt) is acute since those characters
are more like arrow-heads and make very poor brackets.

By themselves, \langle and \rangle will nicely enclose any regular
character, but they are still smaller than some symbols (such as
\int, the integral sign) and smaller than fractions, matrices and
such.  Then you would use \left\langle \right\rangle to make them
expand to cover their over-sized contents.  The same applies to all
the bracket pairs, including parentheses and braces.

The odd part is that ordinarily the characters < and > are assigned
"delimiter codes" (\delcode) corresponding to \langle and \rangle,
so that \left< is a synonym for \left\langle, and vice versa.

--
Donald Arseneau                          asnd at triumf.ca


More information about the texhax mailing list