Here is an MWE which shows that they seem to do the same thing. Is there any reason to prefer one over the other for typesetting groups of equations? I would prefer the align
syntax because it allows intertext
. In the other case, the alignment is limited to aligned
environments within the larger gather
environment. Any thoughts are welcome.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
%==================
% gather+aligned
\begin{gather}
\begin{aligned}
x &= a + b\\
y &= c+ d
\end{aligned}
\end{gather}
%==================
% align+split
\begin{align}
\begin{split}
x &= a + b\\
y &= c+ d
\end{split}
\end{align}
\end{document}
Best Answer
For the example alignment the following are equivalent; actually, the correct outer environment to use is
equation
, as the following code will show; usingsplit
oraligned
for the inner environment in this case doesn't matter.In the output it's possible to see that the correct spacing is obtained with
equation
. Usealign
orgather
only when there is really more than one equation to number.One should also note that "equation+split" results in a different vertical spacing than "equation+aligned" (which isn't really expected).