mathcal letters

[Mimi Burbank]

On Apr06 08:40AM, Angela Partain wrote:
> Hello!
> I have a question about using mathcal letters.  In all the years I've been using tex, I've never been able to get it to work properly.  I was able to fix the problem, but now I have a situation that's not working.

first of all,   \mathcal{A} is the proper usage, and requires
no definition of a "font" to use...
it also requires a $ or something because it is *math*, not text.


> When I use {\cal A}, \cal{A}, {\mathcal A}, or \mathcal{A}, I get an A in Courier type.




{\cal A} should work, unless your tex installation is really old, but
this is the old latex2.09 way of doing things.   The current
LaTeX2e  uses \mathcal{argument}....    it turns what is inside
the braces into the calligraphic font.


> My fix has always been to put this command in the preamble:   \font\mcal=MTMS
> and then type  \text{\mcal A} (in math) or just {\mcal A} in the text.

remove this def...   it is built into LaTeX.


> This works fine unless the mcal letter needs to be sub- or superscript.  In that case, it appears the same size as a normal letter, rather than superscript size.   I tried this:
> \text{\scriptsize {\mcal A}}, to no avail.

well - if you look at your log file, you will see that this is
an error..   mcal can't be used in text mode  ;-)


take the following and latex it and see what happens..
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}

\verb|\mathcal| will work, with \textbf{no} definition
saying what font to use.

\verb+\mathcal+  is a \textbf{math} definition.   It requires
a dollar mark; you don't use  it in ``text''.
$$ \alpha = \mathcal{A} + B_{\mathcal{A}}$$

\end{document}

mimi