R shiny with mathjax: How to avoid parentheses being automatically placed in math mode?

Question

I have a shiny app which uses MathJax. In my normal text, MathJax converts text in parentheses to math mode automatically. Which setting allows me to escape math mode for something simple as a parenthesis?

In the MWE, the first Hello! should have been printed as (Hello!) instead of math mode. How to do this?

MWE:

library(shiny)

server <- shinyServer(function(input, output) {
 })

ui <- shinyUI(fluidPage( 
  withMathJax(),
  tags$div(HTML("<script type='text/x-mathjax-config'>
                MathJax.Hub.Config({
                tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}
                });
                </script>
                ")),

  titlePanel("Minimal application"),
    sidebarLayout(  
    sidebarPanel( 
      fluidRow(h4("(Hello!)"))),
    mainPanel(
      fluidRow(h4("Hello!")))
    )
   ))

shinyApp(ui=ui, server=server)

Answer 1

solution 1

The simplest workaround is to delete ['\\(','\\)'] in the script. This tells the math engine that between "(" and ")" will be treated as math mode. If you want to use math mode, you can still use "$xxx$".

library(shiny)

server <- shinyServer(function(input, output) {
})

ui <- shinyUI(fluidPage( 
    withMathJax(),
    tags$div(HTML("<script type='text/x-mathjax-config'>
                MathJax.Hub.Config({
                tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$']]}
                });
                </script>
                ")),

    titlePanel("Minimal application"),
    sidebarLayout(  
        sidebarPanel( 
            fluidRow(h4("(Hello!)"))),
        mainPanel(
            fluidRow(h4("Hello!")))
    )
))

shinyApp(ui=ui, server=server)

solution 2

Directly escape "()" in the HTML by using <span class='tex2jax_ignore'>. Replace your h4 with this:

fluidRow(HTML("<h4><span class='tex2jax_ignore'>(Hello!)</span></h4>"))),

This will allow you to even escape "$".