The discussion revolves around a minor typesetting issue with the math plugin on the forum. szhorvat reports that a line break occurs before or after math expressions, even if there is no whitespace, which is undesirable. They provide screenshots and markdown examples to illustrate the issue.
sam initially questions the existence of the issue, but szhorvat clarifies with further explanations and examples. sam still struggles to understand the problem, so szhorvat provides additional screenshots and explanations to clarify the expected behavior.
sam eventually understands the issue and agrees that improving it would be beneficial, but suspects it may be challenging. szhorvat acknowledges the difficulty and considers it a cosmetic issue, but still worth improving.
I don’t understand your questions. Look at the screenshot: it’s quite clear. The ) is on a line on its own. It should not be.
To reproduce it, type some math preceded by a space and followed by non-whitespace characters, e.g. (word $x$). Now keep adding characters to the beginning of the line to make the line longer, until it wraps. You will see the ) jumping onto a new line on its own, as in my screenshot.
Wrapping should happen only at whitespace. Words are not broken into half in the middle. The same way, $b_2$ should not separate from ) because there is no space between them.
Here’s another, artifical example. Compare when “x” is math vs when it is not math. When it is not math, it is not separated from the closing parenthesis. This is how it should be. Placing “x” into math mode should not change this.
Yes this clarifies things, I support improving this, but I suspect it is going to be pretty tricky … @danekhollas what are your thoughts here, can you think of any easy improvements that can be made?
Yeah, I was expecting that it would not be easy to fix. But it’s really a cosmetic issue, so not a huge deal. It would be nice if it could be improved, but if not, people can still read the posts just fine. It’s a forum, not a system for publishing books.