nbviewer fail to render latex < in some cases

[zhangyi-hu]

Hi,

I found that < is hard because it interfere with html. I've done experiments with 6 different cases and hope this can help you guys to find a solution.

How it is rendered on nbviewer:
http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/hzzyyy/try/blob/master/latex%20parenthesis%20bug.ipynb

How it is rendered on github:
https://github.com/hzzyyy/try/blob/master/latex%20parenthesis%20bug.ipynb

github rendered all 6 cases correctly.

If github can do it, I believe nbviewer can also do it : )

Cheers
Zhangyi

[minrk]

Thanks for the bug notebook! I've moved this over to jupyter/nbconvert#504

[mpacer]

Technically, whether github counts as rendering these "correctly" depends on how strictly you want to interpret MathJax (and pandoc if we're thinking about pdf output).

Having no spaces around < and > is explicitly discouraged in the MathJax docs.

And for some of the examples that "work" in the notebook, in html export, and in the github viewer (and actually, for simple cases, for pdf export), these are breaking pandoc's conventions for using $…$, with the tex_math_dollars option which state, with added emphasis:

The opening $ must have a non-space character immediately to its right, while the closing $ must have a non-space character immediately to its left, and must not be followed immediately by a digit.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't support these, but that if we do we're flouting these explicit conventions.

[parente]

The nbviewer rendering of the provided notebooks appears correct and matches the GitHub rendering when I view it today. I believe the underlying issue was fixed in jupyter/nbconvert#514 and so I'm going to close this issue.