Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!hsdndev!husc6!husc6.harvard.edu!smith
From: smith@zeus.harvard.edu (Steven Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: 12-point typesetting and LaTeX
Message-ID: <SMITH.91Jun13173811@zeus.harvard.edu>
Date: 13 Jun 91 21:38:11 GMT
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Distribution: comp.text.tex
Organization: Harvard Robotics Lab, Harvard University
Lines: 22

Recently, I tried to incorporate the \big, \Big, ..., \Bigg delimiter
selection scheme of plain TeX within a 12-point LaTeX document.  To my
dismay, I found that the selection of parenthesis size was much
coarser than that of plain TeX's.  After much hair pulling and
profanity I found that LaTeX does *not* set \textfont3 to cmex10 at 12pt
when the styles \documentstyle[12pt]{article} or
\documentstyle[12pt]{book} are used.  Furthermore, the fix

\font\twlex=cmex10 at 12pt
\textfont3=\twlex

must be issued *after* the \begin{document} command because this
command sets \textfont3 to cmex10.

I doubt that these ``features'' were designed into 12-point LaTeX
typesetting.  Does anyone know of a way to fix the file art12.sty to
make them go away?

Does anyone know why Lamport neglected to include the \big, ..., \Bigg
macros in the first place?

Steven Smith