On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Dave wrote:

Hi all,

I am trying to line up some equations on a page and I'd like to insert some whitespace that has the same width as a -ve sign in an equation. An example would be trying to ensure the cosine and sine and on the first and second rows (second column) in the matrix below:

\startpmatrix % Row 1 \NC - \cos \theta_{\text{el}} \, \sin \theta_{\text{az}} \NC \cos \theta_{\text{az}}

change this to \NC \hphantom{-} \cos \theta ....

\NC \sin \theta_{\text{el}} \, \sin \theta_{\text{el}} \NR % Row 2 \NC - \cos \theta_{\text{el}} \, \cos \theta_{\text{az}} \NC - \sin \theta_{\text{az}} \NC \sin \theta_{\text{el}} \, \cos \theta_{\text{el}} \NR % Row 3 \NC - \sin \theta_{\text{el}} \NC 0 \NC \cos \theta_{\text{el}} \NR \stoppmatrix

Any ideas?

Normally you have to be a bit careful with minus as it is both a uniary and binary operator. To get the space equal to a uniary operator \hphantom{-} should be ok, to get space equal to binary operator, you can try \hphantom{{}-} or \hphantom{{}-{}} Aditya