# Good Times in MATLAB: How to Typeset the Multiplication Symbol

The MATLAB output

>> A = rand(2); whos
Name      Size            Bytes  Class     Attributes

A         2x2                32  double


will be familiar to seasoned users. Consider this, however, from MATLAB R2016b:

>> s = string({'One','Two'})

s =
1×2 string array
"One"    "Two"


At first sight, you might not spot anything unusual, other than the new string datatype. But there are two differences. First, MATLAB prints a header giving the type and size of the array. It does so for arrays of type other than double precision and char. Second, the times symbol is no longer an “x” but is now a multiplication symbol: “×”.

The new “times” certainly looks better. There are still remnants of “x”, for example in whos s for the example above, but I presume that all occurrences of “x” will be changed to the new symbol in the next release

However, there is a catch: the “×” symbol is a Unicode character, so it will not print correctly when you include the output in LaTeX (at least with the version provided in TeX Live 2016). Moreover, it may not even save correctly if your editor is not set up for Unicode characters.

Here is how we dealt with the problem in the third edition (published in January 2017) of MATLAB Guide. We put the code

\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0215}{\ensuremath{\times}}


in the preamble of the master TeX file, do.tex. We also told our editor, Emacs, to use a UTF-8 coding, by putting the following code at the end of each included .tex file (we have one file per chapter):

%%% Local Variables:
%%% coding: utf-8
%%% mode: latex
%%% TeX-master: "do"
%%% End:


With this setup we can cut and paste output including “×” into our .tex files and it appears as expected in the LaTeX output.