## November 16, 2005

### Strange behaviour of the LaTeX option

Follow-up to No End of Right Answers from Computer-aided assessment for sciences

The code:
$a_n=\left(1+\frac{1}{n}\right)^n$ 
renders more or less correctly as
$a_n=\left(1+\frac{1}{n}\right)^n$

but when the dollar sign is removed, it renders like this

in my browser Firefox 1.0.7 on MacOS X.

### 13 comments by 3 or more people

1. Hi Trevor,

If you do three blackslashes on a line before and three on the line after, you can escape it and stop it from rendering. Also, if you use the <blockquote> html rather than the bq. shortcut you can put it in quotes.

The way that this stuff is parsed is kind of nasty and sometimes you have to experiment a bit.

16 Nov 2005, 14:27

2. Thanks, Kieran.

No luck with the 3 backslashes (see re-edited version above) but the did the trick.

Any suggestions about fixing the LaTeX rendering?

16 Nov 2005, 14:50

3. The 3 slashes needs clear lines around it, I'd forgotten that. As for the rendering, it looks fine to me so I'm not sure what you mean.

16 Nov 2005, 15:26

4. Now I see why no-one understands what I am getting at! It is a browser problem. I just looked at the rendering in IE and it looks fine.

I have now edited the blog with a screengrab to show what goes wrong in Firefox for MacOS X.

16 Nov 2005, 16:14

5. Wow, most strange. I really don't know what might cause that :(

If you need to delete this entry, just go to your "Admin" -> "Manage your blog entries/drafts" and you can delete it there.

16 Nov 2005, 16:20

6. Just for the record, Safari renders it correctly, as does IE 5.2 for Mac; it also fine in Mozilla on the student network. I haven't tried it on Firefox on a Wintel machine.

16 Nov 2005, 16:46

7. Have now checked that the mathematical expression is rendered correctly by Firefox on a Wintel PC.

16 Nov 2005, 17:38

8. #### Chris May

FWIW, it renders fine for me in Firefox 1.5RC2 on OSX

16 Nov 2005, 19:31

9. #### Chris May

… (one download later) …and, in Firefox 1.0.7 on OSX. So I think it might be something specific to your ffx install. Either that or there's something specific on my mac that makes it work :-) OSX 10.4.3, just in case it makes a difference

16 Nov 2005, 19:41

10. Mmm! Interesting. When I got home I tried in on 2 Macs here (with Firefox 1.0.4 on Mac OS 10.3.9 and 1.0.6 on Mac OS 10.4.3 respectively). I rendered fine in both cases.

At work (after comment 7) I downloaded the DeerPark build (Ff 1.6?) and it rendered as badly as in screenshot. Next time I am in the office, I'll try to get a download of Ff 1.0.6 and try that. Could it be the combination of OS (10.3.9) and Ff1.0.7 the causing the problem.

16 Nov 2005, 20:08

11. I think I have now narrowed it down to a problem on the G4 iMac in my office (either a faulty installation of Firefox or a corruption of the machine's rendering engine). I persuaded my son to download Firefox 1.0.7 on his eMac running Mac OS 10.3.9 and it renders the equation in the blog correctly.

16 Nov 2005, 23:37

12. #### Steven Carpenter

If it helps, it's not rendering correctly for me on Firefox 1.0.7 today.

17 Nov 2005, 13:35

13. I downlaoded and reinstalled Ff 1.0.7 this morning, but it still fails to render correctly.

I also posted the problem on the Firefox support forum but so far no response.

18 Nov 2005, 10:21

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