braces
Is there any way to add braces around a system of equations? Say I want to add braces around:
a=x+2y+3z
b=6x+y+2z
c=5x+3y+z
The best example I could find of how I want the braces to look is the "2d,3d,4th,5th,6th" thing here:
In other words, they need to be curly braces and appear on both sides. They also need to enclose the whole system.
Thanks!
One thing to note is that TeX's only means of nesting arguments are braces. You can define a macro \def\whatever[#1]{...} but when you call it as \whatever[oh[well]], things go down the drain awfully. Calling it as \whatever[{oh[well]}] however works swimmingly, and \whatever never notices it has been taken for a ride by slipping a ] into its argument. So the braces can be used as a means of hiding occurences of the closing delimiter from TeX without actually affecting the intended argument.
It also means that whenever you call a macro using delimited arguments with a non-literal argument (more exactly, an argument not completely under your own control, as it often happens when you write a macro package to be used by others), you should always add a layer of braces around each delimited argument, like \whatever[{#1}] or similar. There is no other way to ensure that arguments will not get chopped up into something different because they themselves may contain a closing bracket.
If you're prepared to load TikZ, here's a version using the calligraphy package.
\documentclass{article}
%\url{https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/373803/86}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.pathreplacing,calligraphy}
\begin{document}
\tikz {\node (a) {\includegraphics[width=.8\textwidth]{batman}}; \draw[decorate,line width=5mm,decoration={calligraphic brace, amplitude=1cm}] (a.north east) -- (a.south east); \draw[line width=5mm,decorate,decoration={calligraphic brace,amplitude=1cm}] (a.south west) -- (a.north west); }
\end{document}
Obviously, you could package all that into a command. I've picked the numbers to show the effect, you can vary them as you please.
Best Answer
Here are two possibilities, depending on what you mean by "curly".
The first type of brace grows wider the taller it gets; however, in this case, I have limited its maximum width to 3ex.
The second type of brace will never grow wider, but only taller.
EDITED to add
\stackMathto perform stacks in math mode.If you had a curly-brace glyph that was more to your liking from a different (importable) font, it could be used in the first method presented below.
For example, here we use the brace from the
mathdesignpackage.As a follow up for the OP, the
mathdesignbraces may be solely obtained (as\textbraceleftand\textbraceright) using the method of egreg at Import curly brackets from MathDesign (Utopia).In the MWE below, I only import it as such. So the left hand
\scaleleftrightuses it, while the right-hand solution uses the default LaTeX brace. However, by uncommenting the additional code provided, these curly braces will become the default math brace.In either case, however, the rest of the
mathdesignglyphs are not imported.