Math & Science ⇒ space in formulas

[drowsy]

Is there a nice way to tell tex not to stretch formulas too wide sometimes?

It often happens that tex makes something like

Code: Select all

a      >       b

instead of a>b in order to find better line breaks.

Is there a variable for this?

[drowsy]

I need to change
\medmuskip and \thickmuskip, right?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi drowsy,

such lengths are described in the excellent Mathmode.pdf document. Btw. some more math related docs can be found here: Mathematics with LaTeX.

Stefan

[daleif]

in those cases it might be a better idea to rewrite some of the text instead.

[drowsy]

in those cases it might be a better idea to rewrite some of the text instead.

Honestly, I find the standard 4-5mu skip in "a>b" disgustingly ugly.

Same for the skips in $x\in E$.

[daleif]

that is mu, not em, and if LaTeX is stretching as far as 4-5em then something is wrong with your document.

[drowsy]

sorry, I meant "mu", of course.

[daleif]

and what should the distances be instead? I find them fairly pleasing

[drowsy]

Here is a random article I am reading atm. Look at $\in$ symbols.
I think whitespace around them should be at least twice as small.

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/1654 ... 401ec1.png

[daleif]

It looks like that is caused by the line breaking algorithm. in order to break the formula without extending out into the margins. It might also be some setting that discourages hyphenation.

In any case I would rewrite that paragraph, and I sometimes do when I edit our preprints.

With everything else in TeX, it is a compromise.