Spacing in Displayed Mathematics

Most Irreal readers probably don’t have much need to typeset mathematics but occasionally the need does arise and if you’re like me, you want it to look as good as possible. Most of us will never be as good as the people who do this professionally but LaTeX gives us a good head start and learning a few style rules means we can produce typeset mathematics we can be proud of.

Nick Higham has a short post on his guidelines for spacing in the typesetting of displayed mathematics. It might seem like this is not something we should concern ourselves with or even something we can control in LaTeX but there is plenty of ways to control such things. Consider, for example, two equations on the same line: \[ax+b=c \quad x^2+y-d=0\] and \[ax+b=c \qquad x^2+y-d=0\] The second looks better because I inserted a double quad instead of a single quad between them. Higham has other examples of small spacing tweaks that makes the final text look better.

Take a look at his post. It’s short and easy to read and may help you produce better mathematical output.

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