# [texhax] Under-Sized Angle Brackets

Mc Kiernan, Daniel Kian, Mc-Kiernan at att.net
Wed Sep 2 23:12:40 CEST 2009

Lars Madsen wrote:

> Mc Kiernan, Daniel Kian, wrote:
>
>> I'm attempting to produce formulae some of which have large angle
>> brackets as delimiters.  Some of these should be, say, 9 lines tall.
>> But, when pdfeTeX renders them, none are a full three lines tall.
>> Other delimiters (parentheses, brackets, and braces), large and
>> small, are rendering fine.
>>
>> I'm using packages graphicx, latexsym, amsmath, amssymb.
> >
>> Thanks in advance for whatever help might be offered.
>

Here's the first formula for which there is a problem:

$$\left\langle \begin{matrix}\overline{{B_{1}\;\subseteq\; C\left(B_{1}\;\cup\; B_{2}\;\cup\; B_{3}\right)}}\;\forall B_{3}\\ \vee\\ \left\{ \begin{matrix}\left[B_{1}\;\subseteq\; C\left(B_{1}\;\cup\; B_{2}\;\cup\; B_{4}\right)\right]\\ \vee\\ \overline{{B_{2}\;\subseteq\; C\left(B_{1}\;\cup\; B_{2}\;\cup\; B_{4}\right)}}\end{matrix}\right\} \forall B_{4}\end{matrix}\right\rangle \forall\left(B_{1},B_{2}\right)$$

> some fonts provide building blocks for creating large delimiters, but
> since \lvert and \rvert are sloped, that cannot be present in the font,
> so pdflatex may be right in refusing to go that large.
>
> I would refrase this equation, as a 9-lined equation is already very

These formulae aren't generally equations, and restating them to reduce the number of lines would generally be impracticable (given other constraints) or in fact reduce their readabilitiy.

> Otherwise draw the delimiter using, say tikz

I cannot tell the publisher to install further software.  If I cannot get taller angle brackets from pdflatex, then I will need to fall back to using fewer distinct delimiters (which will make it harder for the reader to parse the formulae).