# User's computer does not render mathjax

I was trying to answer this question, and it seems that the asker can't view mathjax. I have no idea how to troubleshoot this kind of issue, so some help here would be much appreciated.

Any ideas as to what exactly is going wrong?

EDIT: I was able to come up with a workaround for the particular question, but for future-reference, I'd like to know what went wrong if possible

• What was the workaround? That might give us a hint as to what was going on. – robjohn Aug 21 '13 at 14:28
• @robjohn I uploaded a screenshot of the rendered mathjax. So image-viewing wasn't affected – Ben Grossmann Aug 21 '13 at 14:33
• @robjohn thank you for showing me the ways of your TeX-fU – Ben Grossmann Aug 21 '13 at 14:47
• I just reformatted so things lined up a bit more pleasingly. I don't think it will help the OP. Another idea would be to use the array environment (since it is representing an array). – robjohn Aug 21 '13 at 14:49
• Good idea, I'll keep that in mind next time. – Ben Grossmann Aug 21 '13 at 15:00
• If the post can be viewed without problems, wouldn't (support) be a more appropriate tag than (bug)? – Martin Sleziak Aug 21 '13 at 15:11
• I've added the mathjax tag (which got converted to a tex tag) to attract the MathJax gods. I have no clue what might be wrong with the user's computer. It could be trouble communicating with the MathJax server. – robjohn Aug 21 '13 at 15:12
• @MartinSleziak: good point. – robjohn Aug 21 '13 at 15:12
• There are so many things that can have gone wrong. (1) The user may be behind a firewall that aggressively blocked the MathJAX CDN. (2) The user may have javascript turned off. (3) The user may have a really slow computer and/or running an old broswer so it just takes realllly long to process MathJAX. And there are more reasons that MathJAX may fail. Random guessing is unlikely to help. – Willie Wong Aug 21 '13 at 15:26
• In general I will suggest (a) first finding out the user's browser and operating system versions and (b) direct them to the MathJAX samples page to see if the problem is only on Math.SE. If the user is capable of doing it, guide them through (c) using the javascript console (if the user uses Chrome/Firefox/some browser where such trouble shooting tool is included) and see what the errors are. – Willie Wong Aug 21 '13 at 15:29
• @WillieWong Thank you for the helpful comments. It's good to have some sort of protocol for how to deal with these situations, and these checks seem like a good place to start. – Ben Grossmann Aug 21 '13 at 17:01
• A dedicated chatroom may be useful for following up on Willie's suggestions. – Lord_Farin Aug 21 '13 at 17:16