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My equations are a little too large for the normal eqnarray environment, so I've been using the \small delimiters around the \begin{eqnarray} ... \end{eqnarray}. Unfortunately, this causes the the equation numbering to follow in size.

Is there a way to reduce the size of an equation without reducing its numbering?

lockstep
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user02138
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    eqnarray is obsolete, better is to use align. Can you give an example to see how you use \small delimiters ? You can look at the mathmode.pdf of Herbert Voss – Alain Matthes Mar 27 '11 at 18:40
  • I've been using { \small \begin{eqnarray} ... \end{eqnarray} }. – user02138 Mar 27 '11 at 19:04
  • wrapping \small around a display isn't really a good idea. if you (as you should) don't precede it by a blank line, then the baselines of the preceding paragraph will be tighter than they should be, since TeX doesn't apply baselines until the end of a paragraph. happens all the time, and most people don't notice it. yuck! – barbara beeton Mar 27 '11 at 22:01

2 Answers2

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if you are using amsmath (although since you're using eqnarray you may not be), you can force the equation numbers to always be the same size by adding this code to your preamble:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\maketag@@@}[1]{\hbox{\m@th\normalsize\normalfont#1}}%
\makeatother

but there's another way if you only need one equation number per display. put your display, unnumbered, inside a minipage and reduce the size of the minipage by using \scalebox{...} from the graphicx package. then wrap the scaled minipage in \begin{equation} ... \end{equation} and that will apply a nornal-sized equation number.

barbara beeton
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You can redefine \@eqnnum

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}

\begin{document} 

 \begin{eqnarray} 2x+3 \end{eqnarray} 

 \makeatletter 
 \def\@eqnnum{{\normalsize \normalcolor (\theequation)}} 
  \makeatother

{ \small \begin{eqnarray} 2x+3 \end{eqnarray} } 

\end{document}

enter image description here

Alain Matthes
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