[LON-CAPA-users] Mimetex rendering quirk

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi,

On May 18, 2012, at 7:11 AM, Christian Knieling wrote:
> 
> what happens with the second comma after the fraction? Why is it above
> the baseline?
> 
> <problem>
>  <startouttext />
>    <m display="mimetex">0, \frac{1}{2}, 1, 2</m>
>  <endouttext />
> </problem>

It's just what Mimetex does, there's nothing we can do about it. We have not found a math renderer for the web that does everything beautifully and correctly, every one has some bugs or quirks.

Two quick recommendations:

* Inside of <m>, you still need a math delimiter to switch LaTeX to math rendering - <m> just goes to LaTeX-mode. Mimetex somehow ignores the math delimiters, but printing and the other renderers don't … so it should be <m display="mimetex">$0, \frac{1}{2}, 1, 2$</m> or <m display="mimetex">\[0, \frac{1}{2}, 1, 2\]</m>

* I would recommend not to specify which renderer you want to use, this really limits re-use on the long run. If you leave the "display" unspecified, the course coordinator or the student can decide about the renderer. Future versions of LON-CAPA will support MathJAX, which will likely do a better job overall (still testing this), but when "display" is specified, users cannot take advantage of this.

- Gerd.