How to arbitrarily stretch braces

Question

I want to stretch the \rbrace command by an arbitrary vertical scale factor in order to have precise control over its size inside a TikZ picture. Surely there's a simply command to stretch it, any ideas?

Answer 1

There are many ways to skin a cat.

1. The top one is just an \rbrace, that does not stretch.

2. When used in an equation as part of the \left. ...\right\} syntax, it can stretch, but it will insist on stretching symmetrically about the math axis, and so it may not align with the content, if it is not vertically symmetrical

3. The scalerel package allows one to scale or stretch a glyph to fit the size of something specified, or to a numerical size. In this case, it is scaled directly tot he size of the \rule. The \rule can be hidden by using \scalerel*{\}}{\rule...} or \scaleto{\}}{10ex}.

4. Here is a variant of 3., in which the maximum width of the scale is limited to 1.5ex

5. This one is very versatile. It is an extensible brace, originally horizontal, which I rotated vertically. It fills the box of whatever size you place it in (its one deficiency is that it cannot shrink below a certain minimum size).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{scalerel}
\parskip 1em
\begin{document}
$\rule[-2ex]{1ex}{5ex}\rbrace$

$\left.\rule[-5ex]{1ex}{10ex}\right\rbrace$

\scaleleftright{.}{\rule[-1ex]{1ex}{10ex}}{\rbrace}

\scaleleftright[1.5ex]{.}{\rule[-1ex]{1ex}{10ex}}{\rbrace}

\rotatebox{90}{\makebox[10ex]{\upbracefill}}
\end{document}