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Recently I noticed that my square root symbol is looking really ugly:

That gap. We can see Pennywise eating Georgie throught it.

The square root per se is not correctly connected to the overbar. The picture above is with a small zoom factor. When I zoom in we can see that the overbar is slightly below the top of the square root. Both look pretty bad.

That miss

At first I thought that it was due to the math font I'm using, so I tried the rawest possible example:

\documentclass{minimal}
\begin{document}
  \[A_m = \sqrt{2\mathcal{S}(f)\Delta f}\]
\end{document}

And there we have it:

Another gap

Also browsing through the Similar Questions while writing this one, I saw that this happens quite often (e.g.:This answer, and this one).

What causes this and how to solve it?

Phelype Oleinik
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    It seems more like a viewer issue; try looking at maximum magnification. I see nothing like that. – egreg Nov 12 '17 at 13:30
  • I also thought so, but I used three different viewers (Okular, Evince and Acrobat), and all of them resulted the same. The maximum magnification is in the second picture. I didn't try printing it though... – Phelype Oleinik Nov 12 '17 at 13:35
  • Can you show your log-file? – Ulrike Fischer Nov 12 '17 at 13:37
  • Sure! https://pastebin.com/E20djH6U – Phelype Oleinik Nov 12 '17 at 13:44
  • @DavidCarlisle Sorry, I don't know what the map file is. What do I do to fix this? – Phelype Oleinik Nov 12 '17 at 13:56
  • forget that, I misread, you are using a system supplied texlive so the map file location is ok – David Carlisle Nov 12 '17 at 14:01
  • If you zoom in and out you can sometimes see the join, the square root symbol is a (typically) hinted glyph from the font but the over bar is a rule drawn by TeX, however you wouldn't expect to be able to see this at normal size at normal print resolutions. – David Carlisle Nov 12 '17 at 14:03
  • can you make available the pdf too from your minimal example; at my locale I can't reproduce your problem also when using dvi and xdvi. –  Nov 12 '17 at 14:05
  • @DavidCarlisle Yes, at each zoom level the appearance of the join is different. Indeed, I printed one test page and the appearance is fine. But is there possibility to fix this for the digital version? (sorry for being repetitive :P ) – Phelype Oleinik Nov 12 '17 at 15:15
  • @jfbu Here they are: The pdf from the example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p9q2jcmjlgg7ycy/mwe.pdf?dl=0

    And the pdf from the actual document: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4jw3l2w7senawcd/doc.pdf?dl=0

     – Phelype Oleinik Nov 12 '17 at 15:17
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    @PhelypeOleinik basically the two lines are lined up in the pdf but the font hinting and rules are separately aligned to the pixel grid of your physical device and it depends on the exact arithmetic and heuristics used by your pdf viewer, so basically no you can't stop a jagged join appearing at all resolutions in all pdf viewers – David Carlisle Nov 12 '17 at 15:21
  • @DavidCarlisle That's sad, because that square root symbol is making me really uncomfortable now... But thanks for the explanation anyway! – Phelype Oleinik Nov 12 '17 at 15:25
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    I can confirm that mwe.pdf looks fine even at highest resolution on my Mac OS both with Adobe Acrobat and with Skim. (and also inside the Viewer in Firefox when going to the Dropbox link) –  Nov 12 '17 at 15:27
  • Somewhat related, https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/168806/break-in-square-root-line/168943?s=16|10.1487#168943 and https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/291216/sum-caused-sqrt-to-not-be-slanted/291221?s=1|30.8095#291221 – John Kormylo Nov 12 '17 at 15:28
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    @jfbu Indeed, the viewer in Firefox renders the pdf perfectly. Thanks! – Phelype Oleinik Nov 12 '17 at 15:40

0 Answers0