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It often frustrates me that TeX only supplies a small set of bracket sizes to choose from (or rather, the default fonts do.) Has anybody written a package that provides continuously-sizable brackets, which grow to exactly the correct height? The \left( and \right) commands routinely, in practice, provide brackets too tall for their contents.

Perhaps this is something that could be dealt with in TikZ - it should certainly be powerful enough to draw nicely-shaped brackets, with elegantly-tapering ends, of arbitrary height.

Also see this question: Continuously-sizable fonts? The lmodern package is mentioned there, which can be used to get brackets of any size. Perhaps someone can hack together a solution making use of this.

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Jamie Vicary
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  • @Jamie: The last paragraph seems to demand a separate answer to the rest of the question. Perhaps it should be a separate (linked) question? – Joseph Wright Jun 28 '11 at 16:55
  • A related annoyance about \left and \right is that they don't vertically recenter in a desirable way, e.g. if you have subscripts but not superscripts in between. – Mark Meckes Jun 28 '11 at 17:09
  • Yes, I have also noticed that. I almost always use \raisebox for the material between the brackets to correct for this. – Jamie Vicary Jun 28 '11 at 17:11
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    I thought the \left( and \right) brackets are typeset in a variable size, by placing the lower and upper angle as symbols and draw a line (maybe using multiple |) between them. Or I'm wrong here? – Martin Scharrer Jun 28 '11 at 17:21
  • You're right. But still, the sizes step up in quite large jumps - about 4pt it seems to me. But anyway, I'm concerned more about the smaller end of the spectrum - for example, the difference between \big( and \Big( is quite significant, and much greater than the difference between ( and \big(. – Jamie Vicary Jun 28 '11 at 17:40
  • @Mark, see this question for vertical recentering. – Lev Bishop Jun 29 '11 at 02:43

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The notion of 'correct height' has much more to do with font design and style than with macro programming. What you think of as 'correct' is not necessarily an objective observation, and (esp. in the case of conputer modern/latin modern fonts) it seems lots of people in the past have disagreed with you, upto and including Knuth himself. Still, nothing is to stop anybody/you from creating more 'correct' fonts including brackets that are more to their/your taste.

But be careful with 'continuously sizable' delimiters: you really need discrete sizes to keep a good overview in complex formulas. We tried automatic continuous delimiters in luatex, and abandoned the idea because it made the typeset result hard to read/understand

Taco Hoekwater
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