Regarding groupnotation and spacing

Question

(G, *) is certainly an acceptable notation for a group. However, I prefer the notation enter image description here . As you can see, the distance between the letters and brackets are uncomfortably long. Is there a way to shorten the distance?

Here is a range of options: \documentclass{article} \usepackage{scalerel} \def\Langle{\stretchrel{{<}}{\strut}} \def\Rangle{\stretchrel{{>}}{\strut}} \begin{document} ${<}G,*{>}$ $\langle G,* \rangle$ $\Langle G,* \Rangle$ \end{document} — Steven B. Segletes, Feb 27 '14 at 20:40
Your first option worked brilliantly, I will keep the second one in mind in case I would ever need to expand my knowledge of LaTeX. — Andrew Thompson, Feb 27 '14 at 20:43

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 27 '14 at 20:58

However you end up deciding, you might like to use DeclarePairedDelimiter from the mathtools package

\DeclarePairedDelimiter{\group}{<}{,*{>}}

This will allow you to make your choice in one go, and you can continue typesetting your document without worrying :)

% arara: pdflatex
% !arara: indent: {overwrite: yes}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{mathtools}
\DeclarePairedDelimiter{\group}{<}{,*{>}}

\begin{document}

$\group{G}$
\end{document}

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 27 '14 at 20:51

Here are various options. The first was closest to your original question. The second is advocated by Werner's comment. The third and fourth are homemade versions in which the < and > are either stretched vertically or scaled with a maximum width constraint of 1ex. In both these latter cases, the size is set to span the vertical range of a \strut.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{scalerel}
\def\Langle{\stretchrel{{<}}{\strut}}
\def\Rangle{\stretchrel{{>}}{\strut}}
\def\LLangle{\scalerel[1ex]{{<}}{\strut}}
\def\RRangle{\scalerel[1ex]{{>}}{\strut}}
\begin{document}
${<}G,*{>}$ $\langle G,* \rangle$ $\Langle G,* \Rangle$ $\LLangle G,* \RRangle$
\end{document}

enter image description here

And as Werner suggested, if you use your notation a lot, wrapping it in a macro makes sense, regardless of which option you choose.

Regarding groupnotation and spacing

2 Answers2