Effortless LaTeX Rendering in Editor: A Workaround for Accidental Pop-Ups

[Ibix]

This is a bug people have complained about before, but I've just found a way to make it happen on demand. I was typing a response in this thread and accidentally hovered over the first "related thread", which is titled "Is Second rank tensor always tensor product of two vectors?". The OP in that thread turned out to have a lot of LaTeX, and when the pop-up with the beginning of the post appeared the LaTeX in the edit box rendered itself as well.

Incidentally, I also discovered a possible workaround for us users. At least in this case, pressing "undo" and then "redo" in the editor reverted it to LaTeX source. I guess you'd have to undo to the point where you were when the unwanted rendering happened, so this might not work if you don't notice the rendering soon after it happens.

 

[mfb]

I can't reproduce the problem with the steps you described. Firefox. I tried both the regular and the pseudo-WYSIWYG editor option.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

I could reproduce both the problem and the workaround, but the latter doesn't work if no draft has been saved before the rendering problem occurred.

 

[Ibix]

I can't reproduce the problem with the steps you described. Firefox. I tried both the regular and the pseudo-WYSIWYG editor option.

It only works in the WYSIWYG editor, and it only works once per popup (presumably it remembers the rendered popup) - so if you tried with the plain text editor then the WYSIWYG you won't have got it. Try refreshing the page, switch to WYSIWYG, enter some LaTeX and hover over the related thread again.

 

[Wrichik Basu]

I did some further testing, and it turns out that it has nothing to do with saving a draft. After quoting a post, I have to type something (even a letter will do) to enable the undo option. Then, if the LaTeX renders in the editor, I can simply click on the Undo option. A quick video of the process is available here.

 

[mfb]

It only works in the WYSIWYG editor, and it only works once per popup (presumably it remembers the rendered popup) - so if you tried with the plain text editor then the WYSIWYG you won't have got it. Try refreshing the page, switch to WYSIWYG, enter some LaTeX and hover over the related thread again.

With these steps I can reproduce the bug, too.