3MF

LaTeX mod spacing

In my modern algebra class, we've been working extensively with congruence modulo n. LaTeX has several options for typesetting these statements in the amsmath package. Here you can see what they look like:

Statements 1 and 2 were rendered using "1 \equiv 4 \mod{3}" and "-1 \equiv 2 \bmod{3}" respectively. Generally the methods using parenthesis are preferred. We also have two standard versions of those. Statement 3 uses "\pmod" and Statement 4 uses "\pod". I prefer the way "\pmod" renders however, despite claiming to reduce the spacing before the parenthesis in non-display mode, it stills leaves too big a gap for my taste.

I thought i would share this trick i found in a guide on the Dartmouth College website. It suggested defining a new command to reduce the amount of space and make everything look better. Statement 5 is rendered using this new "\imod" command. Here's the defintion:

\makeatletter
\def\imod#1{\allowbreak\mkern10mu({\operator@font mod}\,\,#1)}
\makeatother


Posted by Matthew at February 20, 2005 05:58 PM