A couple of months ago I was having trouble getting a \bigtimes
symbol that worked well. A few libraries have one, but they all did all sorts of other troublesome things to how math was formatted. In the end I was suggested to just take the code that mathabx
uses to make \bigtimes
and that's worked fantastically:
\DeclareFontFamily{U}{mathx}{\hyphenchar\font45}
\DeclareFontShape{U}{mathx}{m}{n}{
<5> <6> <7> <8> <9> <10>
<10.95> <12> <14.4> <17.28> <20.74> <24.88>
mathx10
}{}
\DeclareSymbolFont{mathx}{U}{mathx}{m}{n}
\DeclareMathSymbol{\bigtimes}{1}{mathx}{"91}
Now I find myself in deed of a variable sized $\ast$
and I was wondering how to adapt this code to do it. Clearly I need to write a new DeclareMathSymbol
line and I presume that I need to input the character code for ast
into where "91
is. I wrote something to brute force checking a couple hundred values of integers and see if I could find the symbol that way, but I could not (and it also made me feel mildly silly). I glanced around a little bit and found the \meaning
command, which did not seem to give the same result. Furthermore I lack a general understanding of latex programming past defining simple macros. But I presume that there is a table somewhere that would have what I'm looking for, so that if in the future I need to make some math symbol variable-sized I don't always have to ask the fine people of tex.stackexchange.
Edit: For my end solution I ended up switching the base font family to cmsy and just making the sole purpose of the font family be to make large characters, i.e.:
\DeclareFontFamily{U}{large}{\hyphenchar\font45}
\DeclareFontShape{U}{large}{m}{n}{
<27>
cmsy10
}{}
\DeclareMathSymbol{\bigtimes}{1}{large}{"02}
\DeclareMathSymbol{\bigtest}{1}{large}{"03}
Although this isn't quite optimal because it introduces a large number of warnings to my log files.
Best Answer
there's a "canned" routine called testfont. use it with plain tex:
it will walk you through what it wants to test. the first question is what font you want. the comprehensive symbols list should show you what fonts the asterisk is in (i'm pretty sure there's one in
cmsy10
). then you tell it what to do. the usual directive isif you want to test another font, then respond
\table\vfill\eject\init
and the "what font" question will come up again. you can preview the result, or print it out for reference. the indices on the top/bottom/sides of the table will identify the addresses of the cells, which is what the last argument of\DeclareMathSymbol
wants.