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Bill Dubuque
Bill Dubuque
4:46 AM
@ellisaba One should never let "good typography" (e.g. average grayness) trump "good logical comprehension". Compose and layout your expressions in a manner that helps the reader best follow the logical flow of the argument. If this happens to offend some typography connoisseurs the don't sweat it since they are likely only an infinitesimal fraction of your audience.
^^^ "the don't" -> "then don't"
 
 
9 hours later…
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
1:34 PM
Suggestions to skip winter bash entirely gained quite a lot of support.
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A: Winter Bash 2019 - is it happening this year?

MechMK1If it does, I'm not excited for it. To me, that would paint the picture like everything is fine, the community is happy and we can all enjoy the winter festivities. It's like pretending that nobody got hurt, as if no harm was done, and as if the biggest problem Stack Exchange, Inc. and the commu...

71
A: Winter Bash 2019 - is it happening this year?

Frédéric HamidiI wouldn't hold my breath. Back in January, months before the current sequence of train wrecks started landing on us, there were signs that hats had overstayed their welcome, so to speak. We basically have been rehashing the same thing every year for a while now, the concept is growing old, and ...

 
Xander Henderson
Xander Henderson
1:47 PM
@BillDubuque I don't think that anyone is suggesting that one should abandon good logical comprehension in favor of good typography. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think that a point which is being elided here is that the conventions of good typography have developed because those conventions tend to improve readability.
Obviously, there are times when "good typography" is not the best solution in terms of readability, but I expect those occurrences to be rare. For example, with respect to display style mathematics in an inline environment, the changes to line spacing make it somewhat more difficult to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.
Hence putting large sums inline makes it a little harder to read.
Of course, if your text is already doublespaced, then this observation is rendered moot.
The "best" solution in a lot of cases is likely to put the larger math elements into an actual display. That is, instead of writing something like $\sum_{i=1}^{n} x_i$ or even $\displaystyle\sum_{i=1}^{n} x_i$, just put it into a display, and write $$ \sum_{i=1}^{n} x_i. $$
 
 
2 hours later…
Bill Dubuque
Bill Dubuque
4:20 PM
@XanderHenderson Yes, but the problem is that some TeX "purists" adhere so religiously to their "rules" that they never allow exceptions - even in cases where it is clear that doing so improves the presentation. One needs to keep that in mind when assessing many of these arguments.
 
Xander Henderson
Xander Henderson
4:37 PM
@BillDubuque Absolutely. I hope I didn't give the impression that I believed that there were hard-and-fast rules which should always be followed. If I did, it was unintentional.
 
 
5 hours later…
elli saba
elli saba
9:13 PM
@BillDubuque I totally agree with you :) // I did learn to use \displaystyle because of this user, he/she has so many beautiful styled answers and also understandable answers. I know all this because he/she used to answer some of my questions.
see for instance his/her most recent answer math.stackexchange.com/questions/3470019/…
using \displaystyle in the integral
 

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