Services & ResourcesWolfram Forums
 MathGroup Archive
 2004 January February March April May June July August September October November December

Re: MultiLine Formula (formatting w/brace)

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg45541] Re: MultiLine Formula (formatting w/brace)
• From: Paul Abbott <paul at physics.uwa.edu.au>
• Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 04:03:55 -0500 (EST)
• Organization: The University of Western Australia
• References: <btthni$sno$1@smc.vnet.net>
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

In article <btthni$sno$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
"Bruce W. Colletti" <bcolletti at compuserve.com> wrote:

> Re Mathematica 5.0.
>
> In a text cell, I want to write a piecewise function...
>
> f(x) = 5x, x < -2
>          7x, x in [-2,3]
>          6x, x > 3
>
> ...displayed with a lefthand side big curly brace that covers all lines
> top-to-bottom, together with centering the "f(x) = " on brace-center.
>
> How would I do this?  I've put the righthand side into a 3x2 table and
> using the BasicTypesetting palette, choose the curly brace button.  This
> nearly works except that righthand side "blank lines" destroy the
> otherwise perfect look.  The problem persists when I change brace size
> (using Format/Size).

This was covered by Neil Soiffer in the Tricks of the Trade column of
The Mathematica Journal 8(1):

Very large brackets and braces for their common uses in Mathematica
(function call, lists) can look silly. Hence, as defined in
UnicodeFontMapping.tr, they are set to grow to at most "2.01" (factor of
two, with a fudge factor) times their normal size when SpanMaxSize is
set to Automatic. Spanning can be controlled by selecting

Expression Input | Spanning Characters | Expand Indefinitely

from the Edit menu. Alternatively, if you use the Option Inspector and
type in Span you will see the Spanning Character Options. You can set
SpanMaxSize around the character, at the cell level, notebook level, or
globally. You may not be happy with what the brackets and braces look
like for function calls and lists, though. Here is the result of setting
SpanMaxSize -> Infinity at the character level.

There is another problem: in each case the opening bracket is displayed
in color, indicating that it is unmatched. In TraditionalForm, a better
alternative is to close off the unmatched left bracket with
\[AutoRightMatch] (or \[EscapeKey]\right.\[EscapeKey]) which keeps
things properly bracketed. This will not work for StandardForm unless
you set DelimiterMatching->None for the cell (or any larger scope). Here
is the result of closing off the unmatched left bracket.

Cheers,
Paul

--
Paul Abbott                                   Phone: +61 8 9380 2734
School of Physics, M013                         Fax: +61 8 9380 1014
The University of Western Australia      (CRICOS Provider No 00126G)
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley WA 6009                      mailto:paul at physics.uwa.edu.au
AUSTRALIA                            http://physics.uwa.edu.au/~paul



• Prev by Date: RE: composing functions
• Next by Date: [Q] Translate Mathematica -> Java
• Previous by thread: MultiLine Formula (formatting w/brace)
• Next by thread: composing functions