Sagemath 9.0 Markdown inconsistency Cocalc vs. Local

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This is a bug in Jupyter: #4259 Markdown broken for single-character bold and italics. Hopefully it will be fixed there (although it doesn't seem to be a priority), so eventually the fix will be in SageMath as well.

For now, a workaround is to write 'three' instead of '3' :)

Another idea is to try JupyterLab, where the respective issue is fixed.

It looks like this is a problem in the markdown processor for the standard Jupyter notebook server (so for sage, it's an upstream bug). The jupyter notebook server in cocalc is a custom one. The problem seems to be that the markdown for a single bold character doesn't get processed right if there are further bold markers: in **a** and **b** the "middle" if there's another such string. The same thing seems to happen with italics, so *a* and *b* and *c* and *d* and *e* gets misrendered as (italics) a* and *b (roman) and (italics) c* and *d (roman) and (italics) e. This should definitely be reported (to jupyter). In the mean time, the workaround would be to avoid bolding single characters ... In this case, you can just spell it out as **three**, which is recommended english style anyway.

I confirm the bug with SageMath 9.0 and 9.1.beta1, running on Ubuntu 18.04 with Firefox browser.

As a workaround, you can use the alternative Markdown notation for bold characters, namely double underscores: replacing **3** by __3__ works.