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I've noticed recently, while reading a lot of older comments, that the TeX seems to be broken; for example, a command will appear like '\rbra ce', and so MathJaX complains that it doesn't know the command '\rbra'. I thought that coming across so many instances of this odd error was, well, odd, but just wrote it off to chance.

However, I just noticed that one of my old comments also suffers from this same issue: Replacement for Lie-algebra complements . (Note the sequence '\mathr m'.) I am as much capable of typoes as the next person, if not more so, but I am almost completely positive that my command '\mathrm' did not have a space when originally posted, and that it compiled correctly. Is there any chance that some recent SO upgrade somehow managed to introduce spaces in the middle of TeX commands in many comments?

EDIT: Asaf Karagila points out the MMSE discussion of exactly the same issue, and @Sklivvz points out that it has now been fixed. As @S.Carnahan mentions, this comes from the way the TeX was being parsed, not from the TeX itself, so my linked comment above no longer displays the issue.

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    $\begingroup$ Related, and [partially at this time] dealt with: meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/24836/… $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2016 at 20:52
  • $\begingroup$ @AsafKaragila, actually, that seems to be exactly the same issue. Should I close this question? $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Aug 17, 2016 at 21:15
  • $\begingroup$ @StefanKohl, the question linked by AsafKaragila seems to be the same issue. You can see it reproduced in the comments there. (I went looking for some other instances "in the wild", simply by going through my MathOverflow history, but can't find them now—there's a lot of MO in my history.) $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Aug 17, 2016 at 21:16
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    $\begingroup$ On the one hand, I'd consider two identical bug reports on two different venues a waste of time; but it's likely that other MO users will run into this, so informing them that this is a known issue is not a bad thing. Closing as a duplicate is impossible anyway, since this is a across the network. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2016 at 21:21
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    $\begingroup$ I have encountered the same problem recently with some of my old comments. Furthermore, when I try to edit the comment (using my moderator powers), there appears to be nothing wrong with the typed text. Rather, it seems that any long unbroken string of text gets spaces automatically inserted during rendering. I would guess that this is a recently implemented way to defeat "window-widening" attacks, and I suppose it needs a bit of tweaking. $\endgroup$
    – S. Carnahan Mod
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 8:41
  • $\begingroup$ @S.Carnahan, indeed, the MMSE post linked by AsafKaragila appears to indicate that this is just a parsing problem (which Sklivvz points out is now fixed), not a typing problem. Thanks for checking! $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 16:36

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There was an issue with the way we render comments. This has been fixed now, please double check and let me know if you find anything.

More information here

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    $\begingroup$ Indeed, fortunately @AsafKaragila linked that question above. Unfortunately I didn't keep a library of examples to check, but the one that prompted me to post appears to be in good shape. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 16:31

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