[texhax] making brackets

[Uwe Lück]

At 13:31 06.04.10, Susan Dittmar wrote:
>Dear Marcia,
>
>Quoting Marcia Beach (m.beach at utoronto.ca):
> > I am preparing a linguistics document and I need to make brackets.  I
> > don't have the LaTex program but I understand it works well for this
> > kind of thing.
> >
> > Brackets are all that I need to draw.  Can I download the program and,
> > if so, is it easy to make brackets?
>
>this question is difficult to answer without knowing you and without
>knowing linguistics well enough for a guess what you could mean with
>'brackets'.
[...]
>If I guess right about those 'brackets' -- if you search for the
>comprehensive LaTeX symbol list (symbols-a4.pdf), among the first tables
>are some phonetic symbol lists and the corresponding commands for use with
>LaTeX.

Guessing from Wikipedia on "brackets", simply "angle brackets" for 
orthography are needed. With (La)TeX, they are $\langle$ $\rangle$. You 
should find them with office programs as well, as some special math 
symbols. I am not referring to $<$ $>$ that sometimes are used as 
substitutes (maybe because of ignorance). With an office program, perhaps 
you can invoke angle brackets with the "formula editor" from the delimiters 
menu (inserting formulas consisting of angle brackets only). More generally 
on LaTeX for linguistics:

     http://mirror.ctan.org//help/Catalogue/bytopic.html#linguistics

HTH -- Uwe.