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This question was migrated from Programmers to Engineering yesterday. One of its answers was formatted oddly:

When the migration was rejected, all answers were deleted on Engineering; users with the appropriate permissions can see the issue captured in the revision history of the answer.

The Markdown of the original revision is:

Well, depending on who you believe, [Healthcare.gov cost between $70
million and...let's call it an even $100 quintillion-Simoleans][4] (I
think we can all agree that it's definitely somewhere in there.)

The dollar signs $ are used as MathJax delimiters on Engineering SE, so the text between them was interpreted in the first revision as a MathJax formula.

I was able to fix the issue after the fact by editing the answer to escape the dollar signs \$. Un-escaped dollar signs $ should be escaped when the question hits one of the sites where they are used as MathJax delimiters.

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  • 1
    How about using a delimiter that makes more common sense then a $? – Luuklag Sep 9 at 9:59
  • Air, different sites escape dollar signs differently. I don't have time ATM to search for which/how but I think it was either backslash vs. double dollar sign equals one rendered dollar sign - which adds a few more ways the migration can be rendered incorrectly. – Rob Sep 9 at 10:58
2

Counterpoint: write and post an answer with MathJax. Realize that the site doesn't support MathJax. Wonder why this math/CS/cryptography/… question was posted on [site where it's off-topic] and flag for migration.

This has happened to me enough times that I don't think posts should be transformed. The likelihood of $ appearing in a post that's on-topic on a site with MathJax is not that high. Or maybe it should only be done between specific pairs of sites: it would make sense for Money → Economics but not for Security → Cryptography or Stack Overflow → Computer Science.

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  • MathJax being escaped where it otherwise would have been rendered correctly does not have the same negative impact on readability, in my opinion. But someone who doesn't grok raw MathJax might disagree. – Air Aug 14 at 17:56

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