User:Stelio/Actuarial/Notation

Supporting information for a Phabricator feature request...

I'm looking to improve the formatting of actuarial notation on Wikipedia. The most important bit that is missing from the site's capabilities is the angle notation used to denote a period of years (but there are other features of the notation which are also difficult to implement). In the example image to the right, it's the angle over the 'n' that is marked as '3'.

Our current workaround is to use a separate horizontal and vertical line, thus: $A_{x:{\begin{smallmatrix}\hline ~n|\end{smallmatrix}}}$. But it's a poor workaround, as you can see.

Table formatting is another solution and looks better:

2	A	1
m|		x	:n

. But again this is not ideal as it is inconsistent with other maths formatting, makes line heights taller than they need to be, and requires that the entire containing paragraph is formatted as in-line to prevent the table block forcing line breaks.

Happily there is a TeX extension that provides all the required functionality for actuarial notation: actuarialsymbol. Can this please be added to the Wikipedia installation?

Thanks, Stelio (talk) 08:59, 12 September 2017 (UTC)