MathJax problems in comments

Question

I'm not sure if this has been reported elsewhere. See for example Fred Kline's comment on quid's answer at https://mathoverflow.net/questions/104608/need-help-defining-placeholders-for-primes

The source is:

I expect I will go with $p^{*}$ and if I need to square it, I could do: $(p^{*})^2$.  I think I'll accept this answer.

It is of course caused by the pair of *'s in consecutive pieces of maths. Trying the old trick (as a moderator I can edit comments, mwahaha) of backticks just causes the math to display literally in a fixed width font.

Answer 1

Fixed in build rev 2013.7.2.799. From this build on special characters between $ signs won't need to be escaped in comments.

However I should note that this breaks some existing comments that escaped special characters:

 $p^{\*}$ test $(p^{\*})^2$

The above markup in existing comments renders the same as in posts: $p^{\*}$ test $(p^{\*})^2$, and can be rewritten as $p^{*}$ test $(p^{*})^2$

Answer 2

Interesting, I've never come across this problem on Physics.SE (and I just confirmed, it does exist). Maybe because I don't use the asterisk for anything (\bar for complex conjugate for me)

Fortunately, there's a workaround, simply pad the asterisk on both sides with a space. LaTeX usually is OK with extra spaces in the mix.

$p^{ * }$ test $(p^{ *}))^2$

The same problem does not occur with underscores ($p_{1}$ test $p_{2}$), so this is probably something fixable.