Prevent certain characters from stretching apart

#1

When using a standard justified alignment, characters in a given line will spread out or squeeze together depending on how many characters are in a line. Let’s say I want to prevent two specific adjacent characters from moving at all with respect to each other. (I want this because I’ve made a “custom symbol” by overlaying two symbols via move.) How would I do this?

Also, I know that some units of space are absolute while some are relative—are there further distinctions to be aware of that might affect this? Currently I’m using spc.

#2

In section 14.8 of the manual there is a list of “Rigid font-dependent length units”, perhaps that is what you want.
I suspect that the unit emunit in tne list is a mistype and should be em.

#3

Could you please post a screenshot of what you would like to prevent from happening?

#4

What about using \nbsp (non-breaking space)? You can type it by pressing [space] and then [tab].

#6

\nbsp seems to render as a slightly grey dash instead of being invisible, for some reason; but moreover, it still seems to allow the characters either side of it to stretch apart in justified alignment, so unfortunately I don’t think it solves the problem.

#7

If I use \move to slightly overlay two adjacent characters (here ∃ and ⋉) to create a composite symbol, they stretch slightly apart in lines with fewer characters in justified alignment: contrast the two following instances.
image image
(I’m using the standard Generic style, with the standard justified alignment it provides, so lines with fewer character( width)s have a larger character spacing than lines with more character( width)s.)

#8

Hmm, at first I really thought this would work, and tried em, ln, and sep. Then I realized why it’s not working: the spacing isn’t coming from the units of move, but instead from the spacing between the two adjacent characters. (Note that there is no space character between the two characters; they’re consecutive. It’s just that their spacing is changing due to how justification works, and I need to somehow prevent that from applying…)

#9

What happens if you put both characters inside a superpose tag? I don’t find documentation on superpose, I think it is made for obtaining composite symbols.

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#10

Try to put them in a tabular, I don’t see any stretching when these two symbols are combined in a tabular.

Update: there do exists stretching when I zoom in 500%, even in a tabular.

#11

I guess the easiest way to make them a real single symbol is to submit a request to unicode committee suggesting adding this character to unicode table. lol

#12

That’s it! This works perfectly!! Thanks so much!

(For anyone reading this in the future who wants to do the same, don’t simply choose Superpose from the Format > Special menu; type \superpose (don’t hit enter or tab) and ctrl-rightarrow, ctrl-rightarrow (as many times as needed). If you hit enter or tab, thing get…confusing, since it then renders the superpose tag :upside_down_face:)