Is there a way to test posts or formatting?

Question

The other day I saw a recommendation from Eddymage on how to include special characters using MathJax. Like this:

$$ ^\dagger $$

I have no experience with MathJax, and wanted to experiment how that works. And for some reason, sometimes the preview that is rendered under posts looks different than what you get when you hit submit (I have that experience with tables sometimes, and it was the case here, too).

Rather than spamming the Meta or creating spurious posts on the main site, is there a test-bed post somewhere that can be used to play around with markdown and formatting, that is periodically purged of answers and comments?

Answer 1

We don’t have one here on RPG, but you can use the sandbox on meta.se.

You mentioned tables sometimes being broken; this issue is documented in this bug report on meta.se, I'll reproduce the entire answer below for reference. You will notice in the answer below that the last markdown table renders as text above table |test|test| |----|----| |test|test| when viewing this post, but if you pull up the post preview by clicking "Edit", the preview renderer will replace the unparsed text with a preview of the mardown table.

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If you have text right above or below the table, the preview renders the table markdown as a table. But after you save the post, the table is not rendered and just shows the markdown code.

You can use the code below as an example. If you try to edit my answer, it shows a table in the preview but not in the backend-rendered post view.

Raw Markdown:

text above table
|test|test|
|----|----|
|test|test|

How it looks in Preview

Result after posting

text above table |test|test| |----|----| |test|test|

So either the backend renderer is broken or the preview renderer is broken.

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Answer 2

The Meta SE formatting sandbox is a great option for testing formatting in a live post. However, it does not do MathJax. If you feel the need to experiment with posting MathJax you could borrow a formatting sandbox on another meta site that has MathJax enabled (caveat: the delimiters may not be the same and some sites support additional formatting that RPG does not). Puzzling's formatting sandbox has MathJax, and I doubt anyone would say anything if you used it for whatever experiment you had in mind.

Answer 3

The web interface contains this:

When writing a post, it includes a look on how the text is parsed below the text entry box. So $a+b+c is rendered as code and \$a+b+c\$ is rendered as formula. Even Images are rendered fully so whatever the image links to, it is rendered, and I did... make snapshotception: