tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Why doesn't \mathit work?)

dthurston comments on "Why doesn't \mathit work?" (14532)

2011-05-17T14:07:17-07:00

I haven't been able to get any text to show up in italic, whatever I try. Maybe this one should be in Roman, but there should be some way to get italic text...

Mariano comments on "Why doesn't \mathit work?" (14512)

2011-05-15T21:44:10-07:00

Diff should be in roman, like Hom, End and Aut, no?

The italic ff ligature in a nice font is nice though :)

theojf comments on "Why doesn't \mathit work?" (14501)

2011-05-14T22:04:40-07:00

In the long run, we should probably fix this. (If memory serves, Anton can add a few lines to MO's MathJax header material to include \mathit, although really it should be done at the whole MathJax level internet-wide.) I would particularly like \textsc.

In the particular case, however, in your comment and answer you correctly use \operatorname rather than \mathrm or \mathit or \text or whatever else people think to use for operator names. It gets the spacing right, and is supported by MathJax. (Moreover, I don't myself care for italicized words in math, so I think no matter what André was wrong to want \mathit in this case. If he really wanted an italicized operator name, I guess \operatorname{\it Diff} would have been correct, although I don't actually remember if MO's MathJax recognizes \it.)

In the very short run, MathJax does accomodate pretty-much arbitrary macroing. So you can always throw in a \newcommand\mathit{...} if you want to write something yourself; it will apply to the rest of that page.

dthurston comments on "Why doesn't \mathit work?" (14478)

2011-05-13T18:08:15-07:00

The commands \mathit seems to be completely ignored in LaTeX input. This yields exceptionally ugly results at times, eg, here. Why does this happen, and can it be fixed?

(\textit likewise does not work right.)