Math delimiters stripped from rich text when opening HTML editor

[AEagle1]

I am entering a large amount of content onto a page in the rich text editor, and there is quite a bit of mathematics taken from LaTeX source. I enter the math surrounded by the standard \(…\) delimiters. If I save the page at that point, all works smoothly: Canvas renders the math, and when I edit again, the delimiters are back.

BUT this page also has some tricky html scopes, and so I often need to open the HTML editor. Doing this strips the math delimiters, and weirdly doubles up the content. E.g., if I had entered `\(x^{y}\)` on the rich text editor, I will get `<p>xyx^{y}</p>` in the HTML editor. 

Any hints on how to avoid this? Obviously a manual workaround is possible but incredibly slow and time-consuming, and it is unavoidable for me to use the source documents I'm using, and unavoidable to sometimes edit the HTML source.

I link to a short screen capture showing the issue: https://share.zight.com/L1ul8Q2e

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AEagle1,

I discovered this problem as well a couple weeks ago as well when working with a Math professor on accessibility, but it hasn't bubbled up to the top of my list to create a ticket for yet.  What I found is that it's the "pretty" html editor that's changing around the HTML.  If you use the raw HTML editor, everything should save properly.  I'd definitely encourage you to contact Canvas support to report this issue so they can hopefully figure out how to get the pretty html editor to keep the proper equation formatting.

-Chris

[Gabriel33]

To expand on what @chriscas said, it looks like once you use the raw HTML editor once, the pretty editor stops breaking the equations as well, even after saving and reopening (I don't know how long that lasts), and in other pages.