## Skewcharacter in TeX

### Skewcharacter in TeX

What is the precise meaning of the skew character in TeX? I have a
style file for using Times or Palatino for math in LaTeX, but some of
the accents (particularly the hat) do not line up properly. It is my
IMPRESSION from reading the appendix in Knuth's book that the skew
character is responsible in some way, but I found that description to
be slightly opaque.  In this vein, is there a clearer description
available of the parameters TeX uses for typesetting math? The
Metafont book simply says to read the TeXbook!
--
_____________________________________________________________________________
Justin R. Smith                                        Office: (215) 895-1847
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science           Home: (215) 446-5271
Drexel University                                         Fax: (215) 895-2070

### Skewcharacter in TeX

What is the precise meaning of the skew character in TeX? I have a
style file for using Times or Palatino for math in LaTeX, but some of
the accents (particularly the hat) do not line up properly. It is my
IMPRESSION from reading the appendix in Knuth's book that the skew
character is responsible in some way, but I found that description to
be slightly opaque.  In this vein, is there a clearer description
available of the parameters TeX uses for typesetting math? The
Metafont book simply says to read the TeXbook!

One of many weirdnesses of a `math font' in TeX is that character widths are
not characters widths, but have to do instead with positioning of
subscripts.  As a result, the standard computation that \accent uses for
accent positioning cannot be used in a math font.  So instead, `bogus' kern
pairs are introduced that are not kern pairs, but instead have to do with
accent character positioning.  These bogus kern pairs are with a character
that one normally would not have kern pairs with, in order to avoid
confusion.  You tell TeX which character that is for a particular font by
setting \skewchar.  To make a font useable in math mode, you need to do
several things in its TFM file, one of them is to set up these bogus kern
pairs.  Careful hand-tuning may be needed to figure out good values for
these bogus kern amounts for every character that may be used with an accent.

I just tried running LaTeX over bbding.ins and bbding.dtx using both
WinShell and WinEdt. Both editors failed because they added a wholly
spurious .tex to the end of the filename.

This is probably not optimal behaviour: users will expect to be
able to install packages by running LaTeX on the distribution pair
without having to resort to a DOS window.

Is there a configuration option that can fix this?

///Peter