MathJax Rendering Issues

[dcroce]

I have about 8~10 issues with MathJax reading certain parts of a notebook incorrectly. Does this require a case by case fix? They are showing up as intended in the ipython notebooks.

Examples: 14.1 see technical note, 14.4 midway down the page.
See original notebooks here

Is there a basic methodology for trouble shooting? I'm not well rehearsed in MathJax syntax.

[dcroce]

Is it possible that MathJax needs updating? If so where can I do that?

[choldgraf]

I agree that MathJax is still a little bit buggy. Ideally I'd like to just replicate whatever MathJax logic is used in the Notebook / JupyterLab interfaces.

Perhaps @minrk or @ian-r-rose or @Carreau knows something about MathJax in the notebook?
I'm configuring and loading my MathJax here:

https://github.com/choldgraf/textbooks-with-jupyter/blob/master/_includes/mathjax.html

but it still only works sometimes (e.g., on the notebooks demo page)

[ian-r-rose]

I'm not sure what could be causing the rendering issues here.
This is where MathJax is configured in JupyterLab.

[Carreau]

The last equation at the end is because the ... |s| .... It interprets the full paragraph as a table, and end up being the follwing html:

$</td>
--
  | <td>s</td>
  | <td>\le 1$ so that it converges.</td>

Thus mathjax does not find the math correctly. Try to deactivate the Markdown table extension ?

[Carreau]

Same for 14.4, it thinks |...| is a table which screw up the HTML and thus mathjax.

[choldgraf]

hmmmm....so I guess the question is: is it better to support more complete mathjax equations but mess up markdown tables, or vice versa...

[Carreau]

Well notebook does not support markdown table. So if you are doing table they won't render in notebook. You can still make raw html table...

So deactivating the table extension will still allow you to do table (but in raw html), and not screw up math.

The only drawback will be no table export in PDF.

Is markdown table even used in this book ?

[choldgraf]

not in this book, but the point is be a generic "create any textbook with your jupyter notebooks" repository, so I don't want to preclude people from this functionality if I don't have to.

However, I think a solution is to disable markdown tables only for the pages that were converted from notebooks, that way the behavior is the same on both platforms.

[choldgraf]

actually, I'm not sure if it's possible to disable table auto-generation in jekyll? seems like this is something built-in to kramdown...

[Carreau]

You may be able to tell Jekyll to use redcarpet instead of Kramdown.

[choldgraf]

do you have any opinions on using one vs. the other? I'm a bit hesitant since I don't know what kinds of downstream effects that would have...

[Carreau]

do you have any opinions on using one vs. the other? I'm a bit hesitant since I don't know what kinds of downstream effects that would have...

I don't remember which is which. I had issue with both.

[choldgraf]

haha yep that sounds like markdown to me ;-)

[choldgraf]

@dcroce it looks like all of the issues you describe are because of markdown auto-formatting of in-line equations. Could you try:

1. Make sure every block equation has $$ around it.
2. Make sure every inline equation has | characters escaped with \. So $P(|\bar{X}_n - \mu| \ge \epsilon) becomes $P(\|\bar{X}_n - \mu\| \ge \epsilon)?

[dcroce]

Alright I will see if that makes the difference.

[dcroce]

In addition to |, _ and * also needs to be escaped. That was able to fix all the errors I had, although it makes the textbook look different from the ipynbs. Thanks for the help!

[choldgraf]

@dcroce could you go into more detail on what you mean by "different from the ipynbs"? :-)

[dcroce]

When opening the ipython notebook, the math shows up slightly different. For example the \ to escape the * will show up in the ipython notebook but on the textbook turns out as desired. There are other minor differences too. See 9.3 of the textbook and compare to the notebook for a specific example (New url is http://prob140.org/textbook/chapters/README)