Some Math formulae cause mathjax to crash

Steps to reproduce

Enter this text
$\alpha$
$\ce{\beta$
Some Text
$\gamma$

Expected result

Some sort of error indicator for the beta entry (red text of the input?), gamma should still render properly.

Actual result

The broken (beta) expression does not show up at all.
The gamma expression does not render and it is not clear why.

Note that beta and gamma can be very far apart and the user will try to fix the gamma expression because that is clearly not rendering.

Environment

  • Operating system: OSX 11.0.1
  • Obsidian version: 0.9.20

Syntax Highlighting and Error reporing are feature requests not bug reports.

I’d argue it’s a bug.

Subsequent rendering of $ expressions anywhere later in the document (many pages on) completely fails and it’s not clear what the cause of it is. Obsidian appears broken. It is not obvious what causes it and hard to fix for a user.

The tendency for the user is to find the issue with the non-rendering expression, which will not fix the problem no matter what you do. So it wastes (a bunch of) time. I spent a good 15 minutes figuring this out. Trying to fix the thing that looked broken.

At the very least, if the rendering of one expression fails, the subsequent expressions should still render. If that’s not possible, something red should show.

The handling of error is an upstream problem. If you try to type something wrong like $\bet$, MathJax tells that something is wrong and the formula is rendered as is in red. Sometimes even a yellow descriptive message is displayed. It seems that they’re missing/not handling some cases.

We will add some checks to circumscribe the problem but I am not sure that’s 100% possible in all cases.

1 Like

Great, thanks.
Did you file an upstream bug with the MathJax people?