I don't believe there's a standard recommendation to answer your question, but it's probably not just a matter of personal preference either. A main criterion for good writing -- in any field, not just in mathematics! -- is the avoidance of all (unnecessary) ambiguity. One approach to keeping ambiguity low is to make sure that all symbols and notational conventions are explained at the outset. For instance, if you wrote something like
Let $\{\vec{v}_1,\vec{v}_2,\dots,\vec{v}_n\}$ denote a set of
$n$ elements of some vector space $V$.
in your paper, it should be clear to all readers that each \vec{v}_i
, i=1,\dots,n
, is a vector and that the subscript i
merely serves to distinguish among the $n$
vectors. No further clarity would be gained, in my view, if the arrow symbol were shifted to the right to make it straddle both the v
glyph and the subscript.
In contrast, suppose that the vector space V
happens to be R^n
and \vec{v}
is some n
-tuple. Now, there might be some ambiguity as to whether \vec{v}_i
denotes the i
-th element of v
(i.e., a scalar) or the i
-th n
-tuple out of some set of n
-tuples. If you need to refer to both types of variables in your paper, you might achieve a slight improvement in clarity by shifting the vector arrow to the right whenever you want to emphasize that you're dealing with an n
-tuple rather than with a scalar.
To be sure, my recommendation in the second case would be to find a different notational solution altogether, in order to avoid any possible ambiguity. For instance, I might write v_i
to denote the scalar quantity, i.e., I'd leave off the arrow entirely. I think that's much more direct and doesn't rely on your readers being alert enough to figure out on their own the meaning of a right-shifted arrow.
From Word to LaTeX via Writer2LaTeX
I will not repeat the manual of Writer2LaTeX, which you should read. But after some years I've got some practical experience:
- It is usefull to delete as much of the layout in Word as possible.
- The whole text should be in one language, make sure that Open/LibreOffice gets that as well. Otherwise you'll end with hundreds of
\foreignlanguage
-commands or similiar.
- Experiment with the different possibilities of Writer2LaTeX. But I found the option "very tidy article" (my translation from German "sehr aufgerÀumter Artikel") produces the best output.
- Find the most complicated chapter, and really experiment with it until you are satisfied.
- Clutterd, complicated code after
\begin{document}
indicates that something is going wrong.
- Usually UTF8 is a good encoding. Depending on your editor on the LaTeX-side be carefull that the editor recognises UTF8 and that you really got that encoding.
- If you have to change or delete a mass of, let's say,
\\ \\ \\
, this is a very good moment to learn a bit about "regular expressions". Doing deletions and changes manually, especially with 45 chapters, will probably take much longer than learning regexp.
Often it is faster to learn something about LaTeX by reading an introduction and the manual of a package (you get the manual by typing texdoc packagename
on the command line), than wildly guessing how something could work.
Best Answer
If you change from
\dot{f_{\dot{x}}}
to\dot{f}_{\dot{x}}
, both dots will be placed correctly.Addendum: A second MWE, which shows the OP's formula, the improvement suggested above, and a possible further improvement on.