# Fixing TeX markup

Every now and then, I see a question or an answer with incorrect TeX markup. Most commonly, I see cos instead of \cos, and so forth. So I go to edit the text, and then I can't submit the edit because only 1 character has changed.

What's the general protocol with this? Should I just ignore such mistakes and leave them alone? Is there some procedure for actually fixing this?

• Glad you brought this up without trying to coerce the system to accept such edits. +1 for that. But is $cos x$ really not understandable? Certainly $\cos x$ looks better, but... if it is so minor, I would let it slide. This has been discussed in several threads on Meta, for example this. I'm not telling that you should not to do it. But, unless I'm mistaken, the concensus (if any) seems to be that we don't want to bump all the deservedly dead questions by fixing such minor blemishes. – Jyrki Lahtonen May 1 '12 at 19:25
• I think that once you have enough points you can make single-character edits, so just hang around long enough and the problem will go away. But I suggest it only be done to questions that are already on the front page anyway. – Gerry Myerson May 2 '12 at 0:12
• Right. I didn't realise that editing a question puts it back to the top of the list... So it's probably only worth doing for new questions. – MathematicalOrchid May 2 '12 at 8:10
• @MathematicalOrchid, or as a byproduct of doing other work on the question (answering, commenting, ...) – vonbrand Aug 13 '15 at 18:24