[texhax] Combining symbols (vertical placement of characters)
Daniel Freedman
freedman at physics.cornell.edu
Wed Jan 14 01:57:13 CET 2009
Thanks for all of the suggestions from everyone to help with my
question. I ended up not using the symbols, but I appreciate the
suggestions.
Just FYI (for others), I discovered the 'mathtools' package, which has
some cool capabilities when it comes to arrows (and I don't recall
mention of it in Glazer's book).
Thanks,
Daniel
On Wed, Dec 31, 2008, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> Uwe L?ck writes:
> > At 20:32 29.12.08, John Palmer wrote:
> > >On Monday 29 December 2008 03:54:11 Daniel Freedman wrote:
> > > > position a bullet over the arrowhead
> > >
> > >I have done this sort of thing by using \raisebox for vertical and \kern for
> > >horizontal movement, but there must be a more robust and elegant way, so I'll
> > >be interested in other replies !
> >
> > If you really want to compose (running just TeX) new glyphs from existing
> > ones, you should know how the latter were designed (and how they are coded
> > in METAFONT), in terms of font dimensions, cf. TeXbook p. 433/447; or of
> > the height of `(' (\mathstrut) ... and in your macros, you should refer to
> > these (\fontdimen, ...) [I can't tell details here]. Referring to such
> > dimensions would be better than trying various numbers ... Replacing the
> > arrowhead with a bullet, you should refer to the height and width of the
> > box enclosing the diagonal stroke and to the width of the bullet and the
> > height of its center (I guess it's axis_height according to TeXbook p.
> > 447). Don't forget \mathpalette ...
> >
> > But John: I wonder whether you are asking about creating new glyphs or just
> > about placing one character over another. The latter task usually requires
> > dimensions of enclosing boxes only; it can be performed through one-column
> > ``tables'' (\oalign) or through the \accent primitive (depends ...). Are
> > you thinking of specific examples that have bothered you?
>
> There is nothing wrong if new symbols are composed with \kern and
> \raisebox. Everything which works is fine. However, the most
> reasonable approach is to check whether a particular symbol exists
> already:
>
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-a4.pdf
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-letter.pdf
>
> This should always be the first step.
>
> Regards,
> Reinhard
--
Daniel Freedman <{freedman at physics | dfreedman at cs}.cornell.edu>
Post-Doc, Distributed Systems, Computer Science, Cornell University
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