Hi onf,
On Mon, 2 Mar 2026, onf wrote:
It's also worth remembering the context in which they were writing it,
though. The printers of the time were fairly limited in all sorts of
ways including the number of glyphs they could work with. In today's
conditions, however, their advice would be fairly stupid. The proper --
and technologically absolutely feasible -- solution is to make eqn
capable of setting typographically correct large square roots, not
insisting users change their equations.
In 30+ years of writing and reviewing reports in *roff/eqn/tbl which often
involve square roots of various sorts, I generally find a way of writing
an equation so I can avoid the need for the square root of a complicated
term where that term is under the square root, i.e. one that needs to have
a massive glyph. I have just done some work working with the square root
of a complex number, i.e.
sqrt(z) where z = x + i y
and EQN's square root is more than adequate.
My experience says that if the square sign looks ugly, the way that the
expression is being phrased needs to be changed to make it easier to read.
Not 100% of the time, but certainly 95% of the time. And in that 5% of
cases, we either raise it to the power of one-half or live with it. My
fields of study may vary from yours so my statement is not universal. But
it works for me and my work colleagues. We work in a range of engineering
fields, aerospace, mechanical, nuclear, geotechnical, structural and even
civil, often with advanced or exotic materials, and subject to (or at) an
abnormal velcoity, loading or velocity or temperature (range) or a a mix
thereof.
You have reminded me that I need to put an explanation like this in my own
variant of the EQN tutorial.
Later - Damian
