Inline Oval symbol in LaTeX

Question

How can I create an inline oval symbol? I tried to use \Ellipse from the bbding package but I get an error saying Command \Asterisk already defined. Probably due to the mathabx package that I am also using.

Answer 1

The tikz package can be used for drawing inline as well as displayed figures. The following minimal example shows how to get the inline symbol of an ellipse as you wish:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}

Here is an inline \tikz \draw (0,0) ellipse (10pt and 5pt); symbol for an ellipse.

\end{document}

With the the following output:

You could also put a macro in the preamble to use it multiple times as follows:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{shapes}
\newcommand{\mysymbol}[1][]{
\begin{tikzpicture}[#1]
\node[draw,ellipse,minimum height=5pt,minimum width=10pt](e){};
\end{tikzpicture}
}
\begin{document}

Here is an inline \mysymbol[baseline=(e.base)] symbol for an ellipse.

\end{document}

which accepts an optional [baseline=] to align with your text as required. More on this can be found here.

The output of the above code is:

Answer 2

Here are two versions. One is a stretched circle. However, the line-stroke width becomes non-uniform under a stretch, so I offer the second one where two stretched circles are overlaid, in an effort to preserve the appearance of uniform stroke width.

I chose the oval size/aspect with the arguments {3}[1.5] to \scalebox. Thee can be changed.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\def\ellipse{\raisebox{-1pt}{\scalebox{3}[1.5]{$\circ$}}}
\def\dellipse{\ooalign{\raise-.25pt\hbox{\ellipse}\cr\ellipse}}
\begin{document}
Here is an \ellipse\ inline ellipse, and one\\
that that has \dellipse\ ``corrected'' line width
\end{document}

Here is a zoom: