My personal position on the aesthetics of growing matching fences has always been very conservative. For instance I feel that the surrounding parentheses in x + 1 ( ----- ) x - 1 should indeed have enough height to cover the numerator and denominator. The display list you have looks right to me. However, I think it is just an algorithmic hack to decide that the fence heights _always_ have to exceed the highest and lowest excursions of numerator and denominator, as in something like ___ oo x + a | | B (x) + C(x) + D i=1 i ( --------------------------------- ) x - 1 or a worse case with an integral that I can't readily do in ASCII. There are expressions in high-energy physics that I don't think used to have matching vast parens before algorithmic typsetting took over from visually oriented. For instance, in the case ||x-a| sin(b)| the important thing is probably that the outer vert pair be associated together and not be confused with the inner. So we have a case here of a modulus of a product of a modulus by something signed. A similar example could be constructed with norms instead of the presumed absolute values using double (or triple, or subscripted) verts. Personally I don't think the outer modulus here needs to be displayed larger at all. If you want always to size fences automatically increasingly outward then one method has got to be a pairing of fences, and a rule such as alluded to above about covering the extreme excursions of any expression nested within. But that leads to things like the TeX dummy \. fences to allow balancing, and to difficulties when an "bracketed expression" continues over a line. In addition there are constructions like the semi-open interval notation [a,b) which might have to have explicit pairings added. PatrickReceived on Wednesday, 3 July 1996 17:53:10 UTC
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