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Bug reports: markup in comments

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    • CommentAuthorrwbarton
    • CommentTimeOct 22nd 2009
     
    (This is arguably a feature request, in that the current behavior is probably intended, but it is sufficiently problematic that I put this in the bug reports section.)

    As far as I can tell no markup is allowed in comments except *...* and _..._ for italics and **...** for bold. In particular things like "<sub>" are preserved. This makes it very difficult to convey things like "H_n(X) -> H_n(Y)" or "H^*(X) -> H^*(Y)". In my opinion it would be greatly preferable to not do any special processing to *...*, _..._, **...** either. If it means people have to read emphasized words surrounded by stars or underscores rather than italicized, that is not a substantial loss.
  2.  

    You can escape special markup characters with backslashes. For example, typing a \*test\* will product "a *test*" rather than "a test".

  3.  
    Anything we can do to get preview for comments?
  4.  

    Preview for questions and answers is really important because editing a question or answer is a big deal. The post can be very long, involving lists, symbols, diagrams, and images. And when you post a question or answer or edit a post, that thread gets bumped to the front of the homepage.

    Comments on the other hand are forced to be very simple. The only markup is italics and bold, they are limited to 600 characters, and they don't move the question around or call attention to it in any way. I admit that sometimes when I see how a comment turns out, I don't like something about it, so copy the text, delete the comment, and post it again. This is mildly annoying, but I don't think it warrants adding a preview for comments feature. Unless a feature is really helpful, it feels like feature creep to me.

    • CommentAuthorrwbarton
    • CommentTimeOct 23rd 2009
     
    > You can escape special markup characters with backslashes.

    Oh, this is good to know. But I think most people don't know that, and since there is no preview, they may easily leave an incomprehensible comment.
  6.  

    I didn't find a corresponding feature request over at meta.stackexchange.com, so I made one: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2130/preview-for-comments

    If you have an account over there, and 15 rep, go upvote it!

  7.  

    @rwbarton: I'll add escaping special characters to the Tips and Tricks page.

    @Scott: upvoted. As I said, I don't think this feature is likely to be implemented, but there's no harm in trying. One thing that would help is if you edited your feature-request to explicitly describe the desired behavior. Should there be a preview button (like there is here) or should it be a live preview (like the Markdown WMD, but it would have to be new javascript which reflects the limited markup allowed in comments)? Should the preview appear above or below the comment input box (I would say above)? Another thing that would help is if you explain what kinds of problems people are having and link to explicit examples (or produce an example on the feature-request itself). Note that Fog Creek has said that if a feature-request is very general (applies to S[OFU] as well as SE), then they will wait for the SO team to implement it rather than doing it themselves. Though a comment preview feature-request hasn't appeared on meta.SO, comment editing has, and it is [status-planned]. If we feel like being able to edit comments is sufficient, then we should be pushing the SO team rather than the SE team.

  8.  
    I just got burned, using unsupported markup in a comment. How about a brief text near the comment editing box, about the (very) limited markup support?
  9.  

    Oh, and I just discovered another one: When there are too many comments, so you need to click the “add/show n more comments” button, you don't get jsMath markup for the revealed comments. Reloading the page just hides those comments again of course, so there seems to be no way to use jsMath markup in these comments (example).

  10.  
    Yeah -- perhaps we should try to add a note near the comment box that markup is extremely limited, and LaTeX discouraged.
  11.  

    A complaint about preview not matching the results. I haven't investigated: just dropping this here for reference.

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