Why did LaTeX rendering break in old posts?

[rcgldr]

See post 2 in this thread, none of the latex lines are working now (they were working before), post 4 is slightly messed up:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=306442

In post 8 in this thread one of lines is messed up:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=360987

Neither of these threads had any issues near the time they were posted. What has changed since then to cause the problem we see now?

 

[micromass]

We have changed to mathjax in june. This causes problems with older threads since mathjax isn't so liberal with regards to delimiters.

For example,

[itex ] ... [/tex ]

was ok before, but not ok now. Also, mistakes in bracketing were ok before, but aren't ok in mathjax.

 

[D H]

And apparently mathjax is quite sensitive to carriage returns. That's apparently the problem with the post #4 in the first cited thread. Post #2 in that thread has problems with braces in some but not all of the math, maybe too many problems and mathjax just gave up?

One solution is to edit those posts as they are reported. However, since the ability to edit ancient posts is limited to mentors, I don't particularly like this solution. Another solution is to just let those old dogs lie.

 

[jhae2.718]

Another broken command is the old [itex][/itex] command.

The 2d post in that thread has at least one mismatched tag ([itex][/tex]); the problems in the fourth most likely result from the way vBulletin breaks long lines.[/itex]

 

[D H]

the problems in the fourth most likely result from the way vBulletin breaks long lines.

It's not vBulletin. The problem is carriage returns manually inserted into the original source. (It doesn't take mentor powers to see the source text; just hit the quote button.)

 

[Fredrik]

It's not vBulletin. The problem is carriage returns manually inserted into the original source. (It doesn't take mentor powers to see the source text; just hit the quote button.)

I did that, and could fix the code just by inserting a few extra spaces. It's definitely the 50 character bug.

Edit: I checked post #2 as well. The first mistake was an incorrect closing tag. I think all the others were missing a } symbol, usually at the end of a sqrt.

 

[rcgldr]

Another solution is to just let those old dogs lie.

Except in this case, someone posted a question about the same subject, so I just linked to the old threads rather than duplicate (and correct) the latex stuff. However if it would be preferred to fix and repost such items, I'll do that in the future.