Editing for missing dollar signs

So, I'm a new user and trying to figure out how things work around here. I saw a post in which someone forgot to put one of their math equations between dollar signs, so it came out in raw LateX rather than in a readable form.

I saw an 'edit' button, and went "I'll just be nice and edit this in". Saw that it'd then enter a queue to have the edit be confirmed, which is fine...but then when I went to try to submit it, I got an error message saying edits had to be at least 6 characters long. I can see why one might not want people going in to edit minor spelling mistakes, but it seems like this is a pretty common edit to want to make....should I just put a comment in for the original poster to fix, or is there some other way around this, or...?

My suggestions, in decreasing order of preference.

1. Try to improve the post in other ways. Rare is a question that cannot be improved. Even rarer is an impeccable question by a user who forgets dollar signs.

2. Leave the post as is. Some 2k user will notice the missing markup and fix it.

3. Work around the restriction in some way: insert whitespace into a formula, or invisible HTML entities in text &nbsp;, etc. Adding an empty formula is probably the worst option in terms of rendering speed.

• There are some posts I've seen that were well-written, but the user thought that MathJax would render \begin{align}\end{align} like LaTeX does (and thus they didn't enter dollar signs). I thought 2k users were still subject to character edit limits... but maybe not. (Aside: do HTML comments work for the character limit? I don't want to test it and bump a post by accident.) – apnorton Oct 1 '14 at 4:16
• huh. I guess MathJax made the dollar signs on align environments optional now. Nevermind about that. – apnorton Oct 1 '14 at 4:17
• #3 is terrible, in my opinion. There's no point in going through the whole edit review process just for adding two dollar signs. – Najib Idrissi Oct 1 '14 at 7:38
• 1. is often not possible. I almost got banned from editing because of some 2/3 edits that added $s and changed the grammar. – ghosts_in_the_code Nov 8 '14 at 4:48 The workaround, which should only be used when absolutely necessary, is to write ${}{}{}\$ at the bottom. It renders invisibly.

• Thanks, working on learning the ropes :) – Alan Oct 1 '14 at 1:37
• Please don't. At least use &nbsp;. Including junk mathjax slows the page down for everyone. – Willie Wong Oct 1 '14 at 8:51
• Fair enough--I'll leave this answer here so people can see that it's not recommended. – apnorton Oct 1 '14 at 20:29