Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.
Comments on Should proposals all have MathJax or none have MathJax?
Post
Should proposals all have MathJax or none have MathJax?
Some Codidact communities have MathJax enabled, while others do not. Each community decides whether they want MathJax based on weighing up the advantages and disadvantages.
However, Codidact Proposals has to make this decision once for all proposed communities. Currently MathJax is switched on for all proposals. This causes problems for some communities, most notably those that have reason to use the dollar sign ($), such as Finance and Accounting. This could be solved by switching off MathJax, but that would remove it for all the other proposals, some of which get significant benefit from it, such as Machine Learning, AI Tech, and Artificial Life.
The difficulties caused when trying to use more than one literal dollar sign ($) in a post are highlighted by an example post on the development server. A single dollar sign in a post is displayed as a dollar sign, but a second dollar sign later in the same paragraph will result in everything between the two being interpreted as MathJax (dollar signs disappear, text between is displayed in a different font, in italics, with all spaces stripped out). This can be suppressed with a double backslash before the first dollar sign, but most users will not know that, especially for a community that does not use MathJax. Worse, when there are more than two dollar signs in a paragraph, each needs a different number of backslashes to suppress MathJax, with no apparent pattern (see the example post linked at the start of this paragraph).
How should we resolve this problem?
- Switch off MathJax for all proposals?
- Keep MathJax for all proposals and accept the difficulty?
- Introduce guidance for communities that have MathJax enabled (including Codidact Proposals)?
- Implement a fix so that MathJax no longer behaves so unpredictably with multiple dollar signs in a paragraph?
Are there any other options? Is there a way to enable MathJax only for certain proposal tags?
1 comment thread