# Issues

Issue #97 resolved

# Math accent placement poor with default font

Joseph Wright
created an issue

As description: example

{{{

# !latex

\documentclass{beamer} \begin{document} \begin{frame}{} $\tilde M$ $\dot u$ $\hat T$ \end{frame} \end{document}

}}} This is basically a font issue, as the standard choice by beamer does not work that well. Possible solutions would be either to (1) sort out the font or (2) choose a different default font. The later is not necessarily so easy: we are not exactly inundated with free sans serif math fonts (though see http://faq.ktug.or.kr/wiki/uploads/MathFonts.pdf for choices). On option (1), this seems attractive but might not be so easy!

(I also note that one can argue that math has to be in a serif font, as font shape conveys mathematical meaning. However, most beamer users seem happy to bend the rules a bit here!)

1. repo owner

I vote for (1) as a long-term goal.

While sans math does convey meaning, it also looks a lot better on presentations than serif, so we should stick to it. And as you say, our users don't complain about it, and there is an option to change it.

It doesn't have to be long-term: I actually posted this as a question on tex.stackexchange.com (and Joseph was so nice to open the issue here). In the meantime I've written a patch for the cmssi font metrics (and for beamerbasefont.sty): http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4192/bad-positioning-of-math-accents-for-the-beamer-standard-font/7576#7576.

I think it looks quite OK; maybe this can be used directly. Since the patch in the font metrics don't imply any changes in the output except the better positioning of the accents, I don't see any problems. Feedback is highly appreciated! (Here or on tex.stackexchange.)

2. reporter

Okay, the solution on {TeX} works nicely. Just one issue: the way the Mercurial repository is currently structured, there is no obvious place to put it :-) Most of the files need to go in texmf/fonts. How do you want to handle this (as I don't do the release, I'm not really fussed). For example, we could do a simple separate package 'beamerfontsupport' and require that.

3. reporter

That is the fix I meant: it's just a question of exactly how to fit it into the current beamer structure. One for Vedran to decide on.

4. reporter

The encoding should not matter here: the glyphs are being modified.

As I wrote, I don't really know anything about encodings. The only important thing is that the modified font metrics are used whatever the encoding is.