Special Characters in Questions

The system supports the use of text, HTML, and MathML for the display of special characters and formatting in the following question fields.

topic

name

question

choice

hint

solution

comment

For maximum compatibility, use only character tags from the HTML 4.0 specification.

MathML tags are recommended for special scientific characters like the following.

Algebraic symbols
Greek letters (and other variable labels)
Equation elements, including operators and arrows

The system uses a cross-platform MathML rendering technology to ensure that special characters rendered in MathML appear consistently on W3C®-compliant browsers.

To generate MathML tags that encode a specific character, use one of the following authoring methods.

For other special characters (for example, non-English characters) you can use any acceptable HTML tags, employing the unicode expression for the character. Note that some platforms and browsers that are non-standard do not map unicode HTML expressions correctly, so results can be unpredictable. Therefore, it is recommended that you use MathML tags for all math and science content. For more information, see Unicode.

Important: In other question fields (not listed at the top of this topic), you must avoid HTML and MathML tags, and limit field content to plain text only. Specifically, HTML and MathML tags in the answer and algorithm field values are rejected by the system. Typically these fields are used to provide commands to the system for processing the question or grading. Hence, they must be formatted according to the system command syntax.