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I like the idea of "stacked sizes" in nested parentheses as discussed in this Question. However, the nath package seems not to work anymore - it doesn't texify.

So considering this example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[fleqn]{amsmath}
\begin{document}
\begin{gather*}
   f(g(x)) \qquad \text{better:} \qquad f\bigl(g(x)\bigr) \\
   a^{f(g(x))} \qquad a^{f\bigl(g(x)\bigr)}
\end{gather*}
\end{document}

yields "unnatural" big parentheses when used in exponent:

yields "unnatural" big parentheses when used in exponent:

Any suggestions / ideas?

David Carlisle
  • 757,742
Clem
  • 1
  • Are you looking for feedback as to which of the size choices are better within exponents? – Werner Dec 31 '19 at 06:32
  • No - I'm looking for ideas how to fix this. In my opinion, the lower right expression looks terrible. So, I'm looking for a parenthesis size that is somewhere between () and \bigl(\bigr) when used in an exponent. – Clem Dec 31 '19 at 09:51
  • 2
    size commands like \bigl are simply not designed to change size in sub and superscripts, the intended markup here is to simply use ( – David Carlisle Dec 31 '19 at 12:32

1 Answers1

1

Making larger parentheses in superscript will probably not make things better, as \textstyle is the next larger size after \scriptstyle. However, you could reduce the size of the parentheses around the x. 

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[fleqn]{amsmath}
\usepackage{relsize}
\begin{document}
\[ \begin{aligned}
   f(g(x)) && \text{better:} && f\bigl(g(x)\bigr) \\
   a^{f(g(x))} && \text{better:} && a^{f(g\mathsmaller(x\mathsmaller))}
\end{aligned} \]
\end{document}

Here I used the \mathsmaller command from the relsize package, but if you don't want to use this package you can replace \mathsmaller( by {\scriptscriptstyle(} (and the same thing with )) to get the exact same output.

Vincent
  • 20,157