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From: geyer@galton.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Math mode in LaTeX
Message-ID: <1991Jun2.175323.14947@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 2 Jun 91 17:53:23 GMT
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (NewsMistress)
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 26


In article <1991Jun2.075733.26205@agate.berkeley.edu>
edward@priam.Berkeley.EDU (Edward Wang) writes:

>The orignal article and I believe all of the followups
>seem to have missed an important point.  To give something
>like "or" the right spacing, you should make it a binary
>operator.  Just using an escape into normal mode (however
>convenient it may be) won't be correct in all situations.
>Sometimes, you may want \mathord or whatever instead.

Quite right, for example

  \newcommand{\set}[1]{\{\,#1\,\}}
  \newcommand{\aand}{\mathbin{\rm and}}
  \newcommand{\oor}{\mathbin{\rm or}}

  \[ C = \set{ (x, y) : x = 0 \aand y \ge 0 \oor x \ge 0 \aand y = 0 } \]

Also note the nice set macro that implements the advice on p.~174 of the
\TeX book.

Charles Geyer
Department of Statistics
University of Chicago
geyer@galton.uchicago.edu