Need an arrow like 'widevec' but pointing in both directions

mounteeriee · Newbie Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2

Please help. I need an arrow that goes over a statement similiar to widevec, but that points in both directions. Can I do this in OOo? How?

Thanks.

yuki · OOo Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2005 Posts: 264

Robert Tucker · Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2006 2:22 am Post subject:

\overleftrightarrow{characterstring}

is supposed to be available in the amsmath package for LaTeX.

I have not so far been able to get it to work with Eqe on my machine (\usepackage{amsmath} needs to go in a preamble).

I have had some success with it using OOoLatex. (OOoLatex seems to work on my OOo developer version (2.0.3 RC) but not my Debian backports (2.0.1) install.)

mounteeriee · Newbie Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2

Nice. Thanks guys.

Godeke · Newbie Joined: 16 Feb 2007 Posts: 2

I notice that while the centered superscript gets the a double arrow character above the entity, it doesn't scale with the text as "widevec" does. Is there an option in OpenOffice Math that will allow for the scaling (say over two characters)? It is common in geometry text to have <->AB and the double arrow should cover the points.

If not, this seems an odd oversight as segments and rays can be defined (with overline and widevec).

OOLatex is overkill for what I'm trying to do (which is allow my son to typeset some simple math). The syntax of OpenOffice Math works quite well for him... Latex, not so much.

acknak · Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 9:07 pm Post subject:

I don't see any way to get Math to do what you want.

In theory, you could combine characters like < - - - - > but instead of ASCII you would use special glyphs designed to combine to produce extended horizontal arrows (this is the way extended vertical symbols like integrals are made). However, I can't locate the proper Unicode characters to do that, and even if we could find them, I expect it would be very hard to find a font that supported them.

OTOH, It is rather easy to use the graphic drawing tools to create either the arrow (which can be resized as you describe) over regular text or a formula, or both the arrow and the letters as a group.

Godeke · Newbie Joined: 16 Feb 2007 Posts: 2

I tried using the graphic tools, but the problem then is that any edit to the document causes things to start to float in all kinds of crazy ways.

My son enters information into a computer as his primary method of doing schoolwork due to a disability. I checked the current version of Word: it can do this, but it isn't possible to enter a text string that is processed as a formula and GUI applications are harder for him to work with...

Ah well, it appears that OOMath can do 99.9% of what he needs it to... it just falls down in geometry.