How do I format a question with two dollar signs?

Question

I'm trying to edit this question which has the text

Digilent Atlys, $199 academic or $349

which is rendered as

Digilent Atlys, $199 academicor$349

Just without the space between "9" and "a", so it looks even more horrible than here.

How can I properly escape the dollar signs? I tried "\$" which improved stuff by printing the literal string "\$Digilent Atlys, $199 academic or $349" which is better, but still silly.

Hopefully meta won't mess up my question, but it's kinda hard to tell as the preview doesn't seem to use TeX to render.

Answer 1

You can \$ escape the LaTeX markdown \$ with backslashes like this: \$. This produces a more natural-looking dollar sign (in fact, I think it's the original font) than the TeX dollar sign. You will have to wait for MathJax to see it in the preview, though. This takes 5-6 seconds of no typing on my machine.

A method used initially was to use a TeX dollar sign: $\$$$\rightarrow\$$. With the new font, it doesn't look too bad.

Alternatively, you can use the acronym 'USD' for United States Dollars since you're quoting American prices. A number of countries use the dollar sign for currency, and while it's usually assumed to refer to US currency, it's a little ambiguous. This is a lazy but simple workaround.

Finally, the TeX parser quits after each <br> or <p> inserted by the markup. This means that you can use one normal dollar sign in each paragraph, each list item, or each separate line. (Though it seems that the TeX parser does something to my lists...will have to look into this at a later date....)

See also this question: TeX Delimiters should be changed

Answer 2

This costs $20 and that costs $30

This costs $20 and that costs $30

I thought of using HTML entity for dollar sign $ but that doesn't work:

This costs $20 and that costs $30

This costs $20 and that costs $30

Using an escaped dollar sign \$ does not work either:

This costs \$20 and that costs \$30

This costs $20 and that costs $30