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IE8 and mathjax

IE8 and mathjax

by Frank Beatrous -
Number of replies: 5
We are just getting started with WebWork 2.5.0. Users of IE8 are having a problem with mathjax.

When a page containing math is initially loaded, no math is rendered. Instead, [math] appears where formulas should. If the page is reloaded, all formulas are correctly rendered.

Jsmath and image rendering seem to work.

No such problems with Firefox or Chrome. Have not tried other versions of IE.

Any suggestions?

--
Frank
In reply to Frank Beatrous

Re: IE8 and mathjax

by Louis Zulli -
This forum seems a lot "quieter" than I remember it being.

At the risk of stating the obvious (or the totally wrong), your issue seems related to IE8 needing to clear its cache.

Perhaps this rather uninspiring reply will prompt other more useful ones. Since I don't have IE8, I can't even test this for you.
In reply to Louis Zulli

Re: IE8 and mathjax

by Frank Beatrous -
Thanks for the suggestion, Louis.

Unfortunately, clearing the cache does not help.

Here is some additional information.

IE9 has the same issue: Mathjax formulas are not rendered on initial loading of pages. We just get [math] wherever a formula is expected. If a page is reloaded by clicking the reload button, the formulas appear.

With IE8 (haven't tried IE9), formulas on the demo pages at the mathjax website appear normally (no page reloads needed). Those pages have meta tags that are not in the pages produced by webwork, and that might make the difference.

We have not encountered this problem with browsers other than MSIE. We have tried various versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari with no issues.

Frank
In reply to Louis Zulli

Re: IE8 and mathjax

by Arnold Pizer -
Hi,

I was hoping that Davide Cervone might comment on this. I had quite a bit of correspondence with Davide concerning issues with MathJax 2.0 and IE (specifically IE 9) back in early March.  The situation in early March was that clearing the cache helps but does not solve the problem.  By helps I mean that usually a few more equations will get typeset after clearing the cache.  For a single problem this will often suffice but e.g. if you are viewing 20 problems in the Library Browser, it is unlikely that all equations in the 20 problems will get typeset. I'm not sure what has changed since early March.

Note that I think MathJax 2.0 is better in this regard than MathJax 1 and maybe IE 9 is better than IE 8.  You don't say what version of MathJax you are running. Jason Aubrey was going to switch WeBWorK's svn repository to load MathJax 2.0. To be honest I never checked to see if this switch over occurred. If you are using MathJax 1 you can switch to MathJax 2.0 with absolutely no change in the WeBWorK code.  You can check the MathJax documentation (http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/installation.html) but if you want to try out the latest developmental release of MathJax 2.0 which might solve the problems with IE (but might possibly have other problems as it is a development version but this is unlikely as Davide has very high standards) use: svn checkout https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/branches/v2.0-latest

Hope this helps a bit.

Arnie


In reply to Arnold Pizer

Re: IE8 and mathjax

by Frank Beatrous -
Thanks, Arnie.

We are using mathjax 2.0.

I'll ask our system administrator to try the mathjax development release.

Frank
In reply to Arnold Pizer

Re: IE8 and mathjax

by Jason Aubrey -
Hi -

The MathJax version pulled down with the webwork svn is MathJax 2.0.  You can be sure that you are running 2.0 by loading a page which displays math using MathJax and then right-clicking on the math and selecting "About MathJax."  Or, on the server you can do the same with the test files in webwork2/htdocs/mathjax/test/.

Also, here's a post about the IE issue from the mathjax team:
http://www.mathjax.org/2010/08/25/news/mathml-in-html5-problems-with-ie9/

Thanks,
Jason