Even if you keep your kitchen relatively clean—wiping down countertops and tables, vacuuming the floor, and keeping the sink area as tidy as possible—grease and grime from regular cooking is going to ... The height of the floor symbol is inconsistent, it is smaller when the fraction contains a lowercase letter in the numerator and larger when the fraction contains numbers or uppercase letters in the numerator. Why is that the case?

Understanding the Context

How can I produce floor symbols that are always the larger size shown in the picture? Is there a macro in latex to write ceil (x) and floor (x) in short form? The long form \left \lceil {x}\right \rceil is a bit lengthy to type every time it is used. How to write ceil and floor in latex?

Key Insights

- LaTeX Stack Exchange Is there a convenient way to typeset the floor or ceiling of a number, without needing to separately code the left and right parts? For example, is there some way to do $\\ceil{x}$ instead of $\\lce... What are some real life application of ceiling and floor functions? Googling this shows some trivial applications. The floor function (also known as the entier function) is defined as having its value the largest integer which does not exceed its argument.

Final Thoughts

When applied to any positive argument it represents the integer part of the argument obtained by suppressing the fractional part. A LaTeX-y way to handle this issue would be to define a macro called, say, \floor, using the \DeclarePairedDelimiter device of the mathtools package. With such a setup, you can pass an optional explicit sizing instruction -- \Big and \bigg in the example code below -- or you can use the "starred" version of the macro -- \floor* -- to autosize the left and right hand brackets. Both ...