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I'm using the Stack Exchange app for Android. The app displays TeX formulas inside questions and answers as expected, but not in comments. Here it shows only the raw TeX code. I first noticed this issue in a comment on the Electrical Engineering site.

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    According to this answer you need to tap the comment first and choose "Render Mathjax"
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 21:04
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    Thanks for moving the question to this site. Is there a reason why MathJax is not enabled by default?
    – Paebbels
    Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 21:23
  • It was @Tim Stone, not me, as for why not enabled by default most likely because it would slow things down too much.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 22:02
  • I tried Render Mathjax, but it does not render \$\frac{1}{16}\$. It's still tex code.
    – Paebbels
    Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 20:40
  • Weird, I thought this should be the same. Leave a comment to Kasra on his reply to the dupe, and see what he has to say. (e.g. bug or by design)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 20:52
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    @Paebbels repro'd on my end, looking into this now.
    – Kasra Rahjerdi
    Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 21:45
  • This still has not been fixed.
    – Jerard Puckett
    Commented Dec 19, 2014 at 15:45
  • @KasraRahjerdi Are there any updates on this issue?
    – Paebbels
    Commented Jan 20, 2015 at 1:29
  • Unlike most MathJax-enabled sites, where the delimiters for online math are single dollar signs $..$, Electrical Engineering uses the dollar sign preceded by backslash: \$ .. \$. It appears that the MathJax configuration shipped with the app does not take this difference into account. I don't think that one configuration file could handle both sorts of delimiters at the same time; it seems the app should load different MathJax configurations for different sites.
    – user259867
    Commented Mar 15, 2015 at 14:07
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    @KasraRahjerdi It would be a good idea to notify math.stackexchange users of the possibility to render MathJax in the comments if they are on their mobile. How? I am not sure about the best way, but maybe in a tutorial like pop up.
    – Matheus Rotta
    Commented Nov 16, 2016 at 1:15
  • @MatheusRotta this is a great idea. We can detect when it's the first time they are seeing a comment with MathJax markup in it and tell them about this functionality.
    – Kasra Rahjerdi
    Commented Nov 16, 2016 at 1:44

1 Answer 1

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Since v1.0.83or somewhere before that, it has been fixed: the app renders the MathJax comment correctly while following per-site's MathJax delimiters.

Note: you still need to tap the comment and select "Render MathJax" to see the rendered text.

LaTeX comment on EE.SE

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  • Note: "Render MathJax" is available on comments that have MathJax markdown even though the site doesn't support it (e.g. Meta SE). It just won't work though. $\frac{1}{16}$
    – Meta Andrew T.
    Commented Feb 23, 2016 at 3:44
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    1.0.84 will use the correct escapes for a given site when deciding whether or not to show "Render MathJax".
    – Brian Nickel
    Commented Mar 15, 2016 at 21:16
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    Is the answer to 'why isn't MathJax auto-rendered in comments viewed in app' officially 'because it would slow the app down too much?'
    – MonaLisaOverdrive
    Commented Mar 20, 2016 at 18:05
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    @MonaLisaOverdrive I think I found answer to the "why" aspect in this post by Kasra Rahjerdi. Quoted in part (and very mildly paraphrased): "Adding MathJax / LaTeX to question and answer bodies is really easy, but adding it to comments, question titles, and the question listings is troublesome. Since everything in the app other than the question/answer bodies are native code rather than webviews, this is going to take us a while to try and figure out. At the moment we're putting it on the backburner."
    – Dan Henderson
    Commented Jun 7, 2017 at 14:49

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