Mathematica's spacing of symbol accents when typesetting mathematical formulas

Question

Mathematica appears to have difficulty horizontally aligning accents (e.g. bars, hats, and tildes) when placed on top of certain mathematical symbols.

Here's a simple example:

Using the AdjustmentBox typesetting construct (or Alt-Left/Right arrow in the frontend), one can manually adjust the relative horizontal position of the hat and the symbol j to produce the more aesthetically pleasing:

There are two problems here:

1). It is inconvenient and time-consuming to make these manual adjustments when this should really be the job of the typesetting engine proper. Indeed, LaTeX is able to position accents correctly over all of the standard symbols (roman and greek letter forms) without the need to manually tweak their relative positioning.

2). The relative re-positioning of the symbols using AdjustmentBox is lost when exporting the Notebook to PDF for printing and re-distribution.

Question:

Does anyone have any suggestions for a more convenient way (preferably automatic) to improve the typeset quality of formulas in Mathematica notebooks that use accents, that preferably will also survive export of the notebook document to PDF format before printing?

Answer 1

You can select " ĵ " from the Windows character map and paste it in.

Style[ĵ, Italic, 24, Bold, FontFamily -> "Times"]

Also you can assign it to an input alias (borrowing from Andrew Moylan)

n = SelectedNotebook[];
SetOptions[n, 
 InputAliases -> 
  Append[Options[n, InputAliases][[1, 2]], "j^" -> "ĵ"]]

Typing Escj^Esc produces ĵ.