Overflow bug with quotation marks inside \text

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Issue Summary

If LaTeX quotation marks are used in a \text box in display math, they cause everything after the opening quote to be repeated on the line below

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Create some display math, using $$...$$ delimiters
2. Add text to the equation, using \text{...}
3. Put a quotation inside the text. Example:

$$x^2 = 4 \Rightarrow x = \pm 2, \text{``just because''}$$

Here is a screenshot of testing in the MathJax demo:

If I use single quotes instead of double quotes, I don't encounter the issue.

I first observed this in a PreTeXt book. The offending equation is here:

https://opentext.uleth.ca/Math1410/SetTheory.html#SetTheory-11

I have tested using the MathJax demo page on both Firefox and Chrome, on both Windows 11 and Pop! OS 22.04

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Note: my live example will disappear shortly. I am changing to single quotes because today is the first day of class and I don't want to scare any students.

[dpvc]

I suspect that this is probably an unfortunate interaction between the TeX input jax and the AsciiMath one. The latter will see the `` as an empty AsciiMath string and try to process that.

It looks like the PreTeXt book includes both input formats, but if you aren't using AsciiMath, you might see if that can be removed from the configuration.

If not, you might be able to include

\let\lq=`

in your document and use \text{\lq\lq...} to get the desired result.

Or you could use smart quotes like \text{“...”}, though I'm not sure if all the output formats from PreTeXt will handle that.

I will look into how to address this, but for now those work-arounds might get you through.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

I thought that might be the issue.
I think the smart quotes will cause problems when I want to produce PDF via LaTeX.

Your solution works for me on the MathJax demo page but not in PreTeXt -- but that means it's now a PreTeXt problem and not a MathJax problem :-)

In the place where I encountered the bug, the quotation marks are not really necessary, so I can drop them for now.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

Could be an MJ3 vs MJ4 thing. On the demo page, I can do $$\let\lq=` \text{\lq\lq...}$$ (all on one line) and it works. But the same hack doesn't go through in PreTeXt, which is still on v3.

[dpvc]

There were some important updates in v4 to the \let, \def, and related commands, and I don't remember if that would work in v3. But you could do \def\lq{`} in v3, so that could be used instead.

[dpvc]

Oh, and if you are getting \lq\lq... as the output, that means you need to load the textmacros TeX package (which is included by default in v4, but not in v3). That might be the issue. Try \require{textmacros} \let\lq=` \text{\lq\lq...}.