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I find the question and accepted answer to Allowing line break at , in inline math mode? very useful, BUT I would like to make an environment (e.g. "allowbreaks") out of it. The problem is that I'm not able to. Let me explain the idea:

\begin{allowbreaks}
Commas are modified in such a way that they allow breaks in
inline mathmode $(a,b,c)$ only within this environment.
\end{allowbreaks}

Is it possible somehow, please?

edit: I renamed the environment to allowbreaks, because of naming conflicts with the command allowbreak.

Community
  • 1
Riccardo T.
  • 673

2 Answers2

8

You can locally modify the behavior of the comma, allowing a break. The trick is to make it "math active":

\documentclass{article}
\newenvironment{allowbreaks}
  {\mathactivatecomma
   \mathcode`\,=\string"8000
   \ignorespaces}
  {\ignorespacesafterend}

\newcommand{\mathactivatecomma}{%
  \begingroup\lccode`~=`\,
  \lowercase{\endgroup\edef~}{\mathchar\the\mathcode`\,\penalty0 }}

\begin{document}
\parbox{1cm}{abc def
\begin{allowbreaks}
$a,b,c,d,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7$
\end{allowbreaks}
haaa 
$a,b,c,d,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7$}
\end{document}

You'll see that the first math formula is broken, while the second one isn't.

However, the method proposed in this answer of mine is, in my opinion, better: use \mathlist{a,b,c,d} for a list of math variables that can be broken at commas.

Community
  • 1
egreg
  • 1,121,712
  • Thanks, but @Herbert's method seems to perform slightly better at formatting. The \mathlist option is surely very interesting and I'll probably end up using it some other time, but at the moment possibly breaking at every comma is exactly what I want to achieve, since the variables I'm listing are quite long tuples. – Riccardo T. Jun 11 '12 at 13:35
  • 1
    Herbert's solution seems slightly better at formatting. Actually it isn't. – egreg Jun 11 '12 at 13:55
4
\documentclass{article}
\newenvironment{allowbreaks}
  {\mathcode`\,="213B}
  {}

\begin{document}
\rightskip=11cm
foo $1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9$
foo bar baz

\begin{allowbreaks}
foo $1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9$
foo bar baz
\end{allowbreaks}

foo $1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9$
foo bar baz

\end{document}

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