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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 answer
MathJax should be enabled everywhere. Many communities either need it or will need it. It's tedious to ask for it every time, and then when it's added, to go back and edit dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of questions which used some crude backtick syntax to make do in absence of MathJax.
What is the reason for not adding anyway? I assumed that Stack sites either added as a retrofit long after the site was created, and/or they had to pay for some MathJax service and didn't want to bother adding native support. I'd like to think we are in a more enlightened place here :) and these don't apply.
You would have a better argument for making backticks for code optional than MathJax. Mathematical notation has much broader relevance in life than code (I say this as a professional software developer and lifelong keen hacker). Virtually everyone learns math in primary school, but most people do not know how to code. And if I had to choose between more people knowing math and more people knowing to code, I would choose math any day even though I dislike math and love coding (and it's not just to reduce job competition! :D).
This causes problems for some communities, most notably those that have reason to use the dollar sign ($), such as Finance and Accounting.
True. But of all the Stack sites I've used, if I had to name one site that doesn't support MathJax that I really, really wish it did, it would be Finance hands down.
It's unfortunate that Knuth did not pick a better syntax for TeX, and then the problem was perpetuated into Markdown by the creators of MathJax. It is indeed annoying when trying to describe currencies.
Why don't we use $$ for inline Math (Latex $) and $$$ (when on its own line) for the display math (TeX $$)? MathJax users will know to try $$ when $ doesn't work, and $$$ at least recalls ``` for code. Plus we could just add them to the little footer below the edit box.
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