Spacing around negative sign in MS Office's Equation Editor

Question

If I want to indicate a negative number in the Equation Editor (Office 2007 and onward), I do this:

-5

Equation Editor renders it nicely, with the hyphen (minus sign?) right close to the number:

But if I've got something more complicated, like a vector in polar notation:

25\angle-5\degree

I get this:

Which looks more like "twenty five angle minus five degrees" rather than "negative five degrees".

Is there any way to fix this?

Answer 1

The closest solution to this problem that I found is to use "Normal text" mode. Either select the minus sign and press "Normal text" in equation constructor, or put it as "-"5 instead of simply -5

The result will look like this:

You can probably bind it to some macro too, but I have no experience with VBA to recommend anything.

Answer 2

You can force the issue by wrapping invisible “parentheses” around the number:

25\angle\left -5° \right

or by using an abstract box that enforces spacing for an unary operator:

25\angle\box(4&-)5°

The argument to \box is documented here.

Results: