Strange bug with \frac and \text in comments [duplicate]

In a recent comment, I used the \text{} command inside a \frac{}{} command several times, and the comment was broken. Trimming it down several times to try to produce a minimal example, I found quite odd behavior.

The following input breaks in a comment:

$\frac{\text{aaaaa}}{\text{aaaaa}}=\left(\frac{\text{aaaaa}}{\text{aaaaa}}\right)$


producing

Remove any of the a's, or the =, and the above comment displays correctly. The comment also displays correctly if one removes the \left and \right commands.

If you write the same comment, except with 's around the expression instead of just $'s, the threshold goes down by one character; remove any two of the a's, or an a and the =, and the comment displays correctly, otherwise it is broken. The original example, and all of the versions described above, display correctly when put in the answer field. Now, I think that perhaps there's something to be said for the argument "you shouldn't be using \text{} so much anyway, or at least not inside \frac{}{}", but I don't know what else this bug might affect, so I am reporting it. I'm using Chrome 19.0.1084.52 on Windows 7 64-bit. • My guess is that this is something to do with the automatic linebreaks. In the following comment I have added a space after the = symbol: – Asaf Karagila Jun 4 '12 at 22:49 •$\frac{\text{aaaaa}}{\text{aaaaa}}= \left(\frac{\text{aaaaa}}{\text{aaaaa}}\right)$– Asaf Karagila Jun 4 '12 at 22:49 • This seems related to this issue observed by joriki and the workaround explained by robjohn in an answer there works: insert some blanks in the endless worm of TeX (e.g. around the equality sign) and it works:$\frac{\text{aaaaa}}{\text{aaaaa}} = \left(\frac{\text{aaaaa}}{\text{aaaaa}}\right)\$. @Asaf: yep. – t.b. Jun 4 '12 at 22:50
• @t.b.: You should post that as an answer. I would do that myself, but I have a meeting with the sandman, Morpheus and other mythological creatures related to the realm of sleep... – Asaf Karagila Jun 4 '12 at 22:52
• It appears that some of the MathJax developers read this forum, but note that the project does accept bug reports. – Dylan Moreland Jun 5 '12 at 4:34