Comment formatting
This page describes some of the formatting options while commenting on Less Wrong. For a complete description, see Markdown's syntax.
(For the Wiki formatting rules, see Help:Formatting at MediaWiki and Help:Style_Guide#Formatting.)
Basic
- *italics* gives italics
- **bold** gives bold
- [Less Wrong](http://www.lesswrong.com) gives Less Wrong
Lists are as such:
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3
Quoted text is prefaced with an '>':
> quoted text
Putting two extra spaces at the end of a line allows to create a newline without starting a new paragraph (_'s represent spaces):
line 1__ next line is directly below
Escaping special symbols
Special symbols, such as closing brackets or stars, may interfere with Markdown syntax. These symbols need to be escaped, that is preceded by by the escape character backslash '\'.
For example, linking to the wikipedia article Bias (statistics) with the code
[bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_(statistics))
will result in incorrect rendering. This can be fixed by placing backslash '\' before the closing bracket in URL:
[bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_(statistics\))
Below is the list of all characters that may need to be escaped:
\ backslash
` backtick
* asterisk
_ underscore
{} curly braces
[] square brackets
() parentheses
# hash mark
+ plus sign
- minus sign (hyphen)
. dot
! exclamation mark
Using LaTeX
LaTeX (pronounced lay-tek) is a popular interface for writing technical documents, in part because of its elegant syntax for recording mathematical equations. To render LaTeX in a Less Wrong comment, it is recommended that you use this web app. Read the section "LaTeX by Hand" if you want to understand the code the app gives you or do things by hand for some reason (e.g. your browser doesn't support Javascript).
LaTeX By Hand
To display the formula defined by LaTeX code
\int_a^b\frac{1}{\sqrt{x}}dx
use the following code in your comment:
this will render the image: 
Watch out for the special symbols in the above section while writing LaTeX code. For example, rendering f(x) using the following code is incorrect:
)
The correct version is this one:
)
Additionally some characters (such as " " and "^") need to be URI encoded. For example, the URI encoding of " " is "%20".
\Delta t
needs
