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Extremely niche thing here that hardly affects anyone at all, but seems worth reporting to someone.

I was reviewing a suggested edit (number 3 in the revision history) in side-by-side mode. One of the fixes had changed the source from something like

$x = 3$ and $y = 5$

to

$$x = 3$$ and $$y = 5$$

The side-by-side display seems to miss the second and third $$ symbols, concatenating both equations and the and into a single equation, which makes it somewhat difficult to see what the change is doing. At first glance it looks like the edit ruined everything.

A more dramatic effect can be seen in the second revision, where the side-by-side display thinks entire sentences are inside math mode and so makes everything look like line noise.

I understand that this display mode is trying to strike a tricky balance between displaying changes in source and showing things as formatted where possible, but in cases like this, it doesn't help at all in the review process. Is there any fix for the parsing so that the segregation between text and math is respected?

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    $\begingroup$ There are several ways that MathJax and the visual differ don't get along. Probably this is bothering people on other MathJax equipped sites. $\endgroup$
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Commented Jun 12, 2013 at 17:12
  • $\begingroup$ I've had issues with this too (meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128068/…). I don't see prospects of this being fixed; however if a side-by-side view without coloring was implemented, that could help things significantly. $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Commented Jun 12, 2013 at 18:51
  • $\begingroup$ Irritatingly, the MathJax renderer runs on the Markdown diff if that's your default, making this even harder to parse. The work-around is to load with the visual diff selected and then switch to Markdown diff. cc @Manish $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Jun 24, 2013 at 3:24
  • $\begingroup$ @Shog9 Huh, nice idea. However, that shouldn't be happening in the first place; the MD diff has the class tex2jax_ignore, which is supposed to denote "leave this alone" blocks. And MathJax is configured to ignore the tex2jax_ignore and dno classes. $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Commented Jun 24, 2013 at 8:21

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