Is there a designated symbol for the negative sign in, say, -16?

Question

I've been using -16 in my LaTeX code to write negative numbers.

But the problem with that, is in many displays and LaTeX rendering kits, it displays the - sign as extremely long and separated from all the other mathematical symbols (e.g. the 16).

Since I knew that LaTeX is an extremely thorough, powerful and complex language, I thought there definitely must be a way to pass this slightly annoying problem.

I don't really want my users looking at a mile-long negative sign.

Is there a way?

Example:

Answer 1

I am not a fan of typing numbers in the text in mathmode. It's fine if you use a complete font, but what if you decide to change the math font later? I prefer to use the textminus from the textcomp package. If your editor is unicode capable you can enter the proper minus symbol directly.

Edit: siunitx is able to handle numbers correctly as well.

Edit 2: To respond a bit more to the question asked, there is no typographical difference between a 'minus' and 'negative' sign. The difference is the kerning: With $-12$ the sign is close to the number, with $10-12$ the minus has appropriate kerning between the numbers. In short, there should be no need to resize the minus sign for negative numbers as a good font should have a minus sign so that its length blends in well with text.

\documentclass{scrartcl}

\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{mathpazo}
\usepackage{eulervm}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{2212}{\textminus}% requires a unicode capable editor

\usepackage{siunitx}
\sisetup{
   detect-mode,
   detect-family,
   detect-inline-family=math,
}

\begin{document}

\noindent
Number \textminus10 (textcomp minus)\\
Number −10 (unicode minus)\\% requires a unicode capable editor
Number -10 (normal text minus)\\
Number $-10$ (all math mode)\\    
\vspace{1ex}
\noindent
Number \num{-16} (siunitx textmode. No bug, my bad. Sorry Joseph)\\
Number $\num{-16}$ (siunitx mathmode)

\end{document}

Answer 2

David's

Using a hyphen as in (3) is just horrible, it's all wrong.

got me thinking and I guess a nice alternative (if you don't like the default length) is to define the command \minus like that:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\newcommand{\minus}{\scalebox{0.75}[1.0]{$-$}}

\begin{document}
  $\minus 16$

  $-16$
\end{document}

where 0.75 is the horizontal scaling of the box.

Answer 3

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
1: ${}-16$
2: $-16$
3: -$16$
4: $^{-}16$
5: $^{-}!16$
\end{document}

I think the normal usage is as in (2) with the normal length minus sign, If used in prefix position TeX does give it closer spacing than when it is used as a binary operator (compare with (1) ).

Using a hyphen as in (3) is just horrible, it's all wrong.

It may depend on national customs but here in the UK for educational use it's customary to distinguish the number -16 from 0 - 16 more clearly so that you can wrote 3 - -16 etc and distinguish the prefix version as part of the number from the infix operator. Using one of (4) or (5) according to taste might be suitable for that usage.

Answer 4

If you use the siunitx package, it cares about the right sign and font:

\documentclass[parskip]{scrartcl}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{tgschola}

\usepackage{siunitx}
\sisetup{
   detect-family,
   detect-inline-family=math,
}

\begin{document}
Textmode: \num{-16}

Mathmode: $\num{-16}$

\sffamily
Textmode: \num{-16}

Mathmode: $\num{-16}$

\ttfamily
Textmode: \num{-16}

Mathmode: $\num{-16}$
\end{document}

Answer 5

Look at the following:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{times}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{rrrr}
  -16&--16&-$16$&$-16$\\
  +16&+16&+$16$&$+16$
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

The hyphen - from the text font (here Times) does not match the +, but the -- does. On the other hand the minus and plus in math mode match one another. And also one may wish to have the minus and plus match in weight the digits. So either do everything in text mode (and use --) or everything in math mode (perhaps with some math font having shorter minus and plus signs if you can find that rarity...)

Answer 6

A while ago I started to use:

\newcommand{\p}{\textup{\texttt{+}}} % small unary plus
\newcommand{\m}{\textup{\texttt{-}}} % small unary minus

Answer 7

In Unicode, you might use the minus character − (U+2212), rather than the hyphen-minus -. You might like the former better.

Answer 8

After seeing how all the other answers work, with packages and text and whatnot, it made me think about it and went back and tried the simplest most obvious thing, just put it as an exponent on a blank space, and it worked great. Hopefully this way will be helpful to others.

$\ ^-16$
$x = \ ^-16$
$y_2 \geq \ ^-(1 - x_2) $

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