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}
![enter image description here](https://cdn.statically.io/img/i.sstatic.net/FURHc.png)
$-16$
to me.\text{-}
\text{-}
is not equivalent to a minus sign. better would be an en-dash (\text{--}
) since it has about the same thickness as a minus, but the vertical positioning is off.\scalebox
to get a shorter minus in math mode.\minus
, and make it an "ordinary" character to guarantee that the spacing is dependable.