On Thursday, 2003-07-17, 16:07, CEST, Robert Ennals wrote:
Well, for the most part, LaTeX only provides common operators. One problem, I came across some weeks ago, is that it is *not* possible to define his/her own operators (or, at least, that Lamport's "LaTeX - A Document Preparation System" doesn't tell you how you can define them).
It's actually fairly easy. There are several ways to do it. A simple hacky way to do it is the following:
* Draw a little picture of your operator in your favorite drawing package.
* Save this picture as an EPS drawing
* define a new command that inserts this eps drawing, possibly scaling it appropriately. E.g.
\newcommand{\myop}{\scalebox{0.1}{operators/myop.eps}}
* Then just use \myop like any other operator in math mode.
What this hack won't do is automatically change the size of the operator if the maths is in a subscript. There is probably an easy way to do this, but I haven't worked it out.
A more elegant way to do it is to define a new postscript font (not hard if you have the correct software) and then define your operator macro to insert the relevant character.
Hello, I think, in both cases you don't define an *operator*. LaTeX probably won't use the correct spacing around the symbol. A related problem is that I cannot see a way to define a new "log-like function" (as Lamport names them), i.e., a function with a name consisting of several letters which have to be set in upright font with no spaces between them. Examples are log, min, max, sin, cos and tan.
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Wolfgang