Math & Science ⇒ To align items in several equations

[Cham]

I need to align several items in many equations, and there's something I don't understand. Here's a very simple example :

Code: Select all

\begin{align}
   & a &&= x \\
   & b + c &&= x + y
\end{align}

I want to left-align the left members ("a" and "b + c"), while still aligning the "=". The code above is working well, but there's a large ugly space at the left of the "=" sign. How can I modify that code just to remove that large gap ?

The following code looks nicer once compiled, but the left members aren't aligned :

Code: Select all

\begin{align}
   a &= x \\
   b + c &= x + y

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Cham,

you could use an alignat environment:

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\begin{alignat}{2}
...

Use & for alignment and for separating the two columns.

Your second code example looks good to me. Right aligning the part left of the equal sign is very common, so it's the standard behavior of amsmath's align.

Stefan

[Cham]

Thanks for the fast reply. This solves my problem.

[Cham]

Maybe there's a better way to do my stuff (?) : I'm actually writing several tensor components, each one on a separate line. The code looks like this :

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	\begin{alignat}{2}
		& T_{j\,=\,2}^{m\,=\,0} &&= blablabla, \\ \nonumber \\
		& T_{j\,=\,2}^{m\,=\,\pm 1} &&= blablabla, \\ \nonumber \\
		& T_{j\,=\,2}^{m\,=\,\pm 2} &&= blablabla,
	\end{alignat}

Do you think there's a better way to do this ?

EDIT : by the way, is there a way to compile the TeX code on this forum, so we can have a compiled view of the code ? We can do this on lots of standard forums on the net. Why not here too ?