On 2014-06-11 19:29, Mike Stay wrote:
On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 11:48 AM, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
Surely hacking MetaFont is doubtless The Right Thing, but we were hoping for something quick and dirty, more like an update some old-school mechanical typewritten <heart><backspace><arrow> ...what one might've resorted to for, say, APL, INTERCAL (or, heh, Knuth's pre-Tex MS for volume 4!).
Here's a stackoverflow question about horizontal space in latex: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/74353/what-commands-are-there-for-hor...
... and I think http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67912/large-negative-spaces?lq=1 gives exactly what you need in its definition of \negphantom{}. You can do \heartsuit \negphantom{\heartsuit} \leftarrow, for example.