[texhax] Misplaced parentheses

[Donald Arseneau]

Michael Barr <barr at math.mcgill.ca> writes:

> I don't expect tex to produce awful-looking output.

Michael, are you Rip Van Winkle, asleep for 20 years?

> Perhaps the person (I deleted the note because it was so unresponsive)

Ooooh! Petulent fanboi.

> $(\widehat d)$

There are many issues here, and who knows what bugs you
the most.

1) the letter "d" has its high point over on the right, but the 
accent is centered over the entire letter, extrapolated along the
slope.  If you take the wide part of the d, follow a sloped line
up parallel to the stem, you nearly meet the apex of the hat.
I bet you expect the hat to be aligned with the stem only.

2) The character d in computer modern math italic has the wrong
bounding box. This is a typical Knutian ad-hoc-hack so that 
"dx" looks like a differential instead of d times x.  Compare
$d\vrule = \l\vrule$.

3) Math accents are made invisible to the rest of the layout.
(viz ${\hat x}^2$).  The overlap on the side is the inevitable
result when you put a wider accent on a narrower letter

-- 
Donald Arseneau                          asnd at triumf.ca