12.2 Making it bold

For bold Latin letters only, you can use the command ; for everything else, there is the bm package. Although amsmath provides and , the rules about when to use which command, and many of the restrictions on when they work, can now be avoided: just load the bm package and use to make any formula as bold and beautiful as the available fonts allow.

12.2.1 bm — Making bold

The bm package by David Carlisle addresses the problem that it is rather difficult to bolden individual symbols in a math formula without altering the spacing or introducing other unwanted side effects.1

The example below shows many ways to use the and commands and a strategy for defining shorthand names for frequently occurring bold symbols, using both standard LaTEX’s \newcommand and , which is provided by bm. Note that is not identical to : the former produces bold roman “xy”, and the latter produces “xy” (i.e., bold math italic).