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Below is a screenshot showing a page layout bug. The trig expression displayed in the bottom of the preview window should not be there - it's part of the question - not part of my answer. Other instances are much worse, with the preview being totally overwritten and unreadable. Reproducible in IE8 on XP SP3.

EDIT This bug still exists - see the 2nd screenshot below. I was able to reproduce it again while editing my answer here. It appears to depend crucially on contextual information so may be difficult to reproduce.

enter image description here enter image description here

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I don't think it's IE 8 specific but rather a matter of the site's design. It looks the same for me: FF 4.0.1, OS X 10.6.7. – t.b. May 13 '11 at 22:25
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I still can't reproduce this in Firefox 4, Chrome (latest), or IE9. Have you considered using a more modern browser, just to rule out IE8 peculiarities, of which there are .. many? – Jeff Atwood♦ May 21 '11 at 21:20
@Jeff I did reproduce it before in one late version of Firefox 3, and Theo reproduced it in 4.0.1 - see above. So it's not version dependent. Rather, it seems to be page-content dependent. How can I aproporiately cache/dump what is needed to get a snapshot, so it can be reproduced after the page changes? – Gone May 21 '11 at 21:32
I tried and I couldn't reproduce it in either of the two example cases, still same config as mentioned above. I also resized the windows several times, reloaded and shift-reloaded the page before entering edit mode, I even restarted the browser and emptied the cache. It always looked fine. – t.b. May 21 '11 at 22:02
@Theo Both are currently reproducible for me in IE8. Attempting to edit either answer shows similar garbage. Ditto after clearing the cache. – Gone May 21 '11 at 22:17
@Bill Have you considered the fact that this could happen when you click on edit while the tex of the question is still being rendered? – Phira May 22 '11 at 8:02
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@user9325 The problem appears to be with the rendering of the TeX code from the question pane that is displayed on the answer edit page. The TeX from the question pane appears to be rendered after the edit pane has been displayed on top of the question pane, so it is mistakenly rendered in the edit pane (or some other random place). – Gone May 22 '11 at 13:25

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up vote 4 down vote

I am not able to reproduce this in Firefox 4 or Chrome (latest ver) or IE9, under Windows 7; when editing that post the question formulas do not extend below the question area + expander.

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I tried again and everything looks fine now for me too, so I haven't been able to reproduce it either. – t.b. May 18 '11 at 9:45
I too am unable to reproduce it, even after rolling back the question to the same version as when reported. But it was reproducible at the time I reported it (even in other browsers/platforms, as Theo comfirmed). So it seems that either the page has changed in a way that makes it nonrepro, or else the bug has been fixed. – Gone May 18 '11 at 14:05
@Bill: Out of curiosity, was the width of your browser window the same both times? – Isaac May 18 '11 at 20:49
@Isaac Maybe, but I can't say for sure. I noticed when attempting to reproduce it today that the offending latex expr in the question renders wider than the window, so perhaps that may have played some role (if it was also true when originally reported). I even reverted the question to the original state but it still failed to repro. It may depend on other things that have now changed (e.g. new answers on the page, etc). Is there a recommended way to snapshot the page in a reproducible state? – Gone May 18 '11 at 21:02
@Bill: I don't know if there's a recommended way or not; I was actually thinking that I've occasionally seen a glitch where a MathJax-rendered expression was above or below or somehow vertically displaced from where it should have been, but that only occurs when the expression is at the very beginning or end of a line (and maybe more specific than that—I haven't been able to reliably reproduce it, so I haven't reported it). – Isaac May 18 '11 at 21:29
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@Isaac Yes, I've encountered the bug where MathJax exps at the end of a paragraph get transported to the beginning (iirc). But this appears to be a different beast, having to do with how the answer preview pane overlaps the question pane. It seems as if the mathjax exp from the question is being drawn after the the question preview has been displayed on top of the answer pane, thus incorrectly being displayed in the answer preview pane. – Gone May 18 '11 at 21:57

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