[OS X TeX] Looking for suggestions

[Themis Matsoukas]

Not answering your question directly, I think that notational purity is an impossible ideal and one should be willing to settle for a little less purity if the benefit is more clarity. 

Having said that, once I read a paper where temperature was $a$, pressure was $g$ and energy was $\phi$ — needless to say that paper was unreadable.

Themis

Themis
tmatsoukas at iCloud.com





> On Jan 27, 2017, at 12:34 PM, David Derbes <loki at uchicago.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi, all. 
> 
> I’m deep into a manuscript (with a few other folks) and one of us is bothered by an orthographic issue. The manuscript (Sidney Coleman’s lecture notes on quantum field theory, which we hope to get out by the summer) has many references to the action, $\int d^{4}x\,\mathscr{L}$, and the scattering matrix. Alas, both are typically denoted with the same symbol, $S$. Usually these two things are far apart enough to not cause confusion, but not always. At the moment we’re using $\mathscr{S}$ for the action and $\mathrm{S}$ for the S-matrix. Probably there is a better solution. We’re reluctant to use anything but some variant of $S$ for each of these. (We could introduce $\mathcal{A}$ for the action or something but that is not very traditional. I wish Feynman had used a different symbol for the action, but it’s too late now…)
> 
> Has anyone solved the problem, or has anyone seen an elegant solution, to the overloading of this symbol?
> 
> Many thanks in advance,
> 
> David Derbes
> Laboratory Schools, University of Chicago
> 
> 
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