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+<head>
+<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label askquestion</title>
+</head><body>
+<h3>How to ask a question</h3>
+<p/>You want help from the community at large; you&rsquo;ve decided where you&rsquo;re
+going to <a href="FAQ-gethelp.html">ask your question</a>, but how do you
+phrase it?
+<p/>Excellent &ldquo;general&rdquo; advice (how to ask questions of anyone) is
+contained in
+
+<a href="http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html">Eric Raymond&rsquo;s article on the topic</a>.
+Eric&rsquo;s an extremely self-confident person, and this comes through in
+his advice; but his guidelines are very good, even for us in the
+un-self-confident majority. It&rsquo;s important to remember that you don&rsquo;t
+have a right to advice from the world, but that if you express
+yourself well, you will usually find someone who will be pleased to
+help.
+<p/>So how do you express yourself in the (La)TeX world? There aren&rsquo;t
+any comprehensive rules, but a few guidelines may help in the
+application of your own common sense.
+<ul>
+<li> Make sure you&rsquo;re asking the right people. Don&rsquo;t ask in a TeX
+ forum about printer device drivers for the <i>Foobar</i>
+ operating system. Yes, TeX users need printers, but no, TeX
+ users will typically <em>not</em> be <i>Foobar</i> systems
+ managers.
+<p/> Similarly, avoid posing a question in a language that the majority
+ of the group don&rsquo;t use: post in Ruritanian to
+ <i>de.comp.text.tex</i> and you may have a long wait before a
+ German- and Ruritanian-speaking TeX expert notices your
+ question.
+<li> If your question is (or may be) TeX-system-specific, report
+ what system you&rsquo;re using, or intend to use: &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t install
+ TeX&rdquo; is as good as useless, whereas &ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying to install the
+ <i>mumbleTeX</i> distribution on the <i>Grobble</i>
+ operating system&rdquo; gives all the context a potential respondent
+ might need. Another common situation where this information is
+ important is when you&rsquo;re having trouble installing something new in
+ your system: &ldquo;I want to add the <i>glugtheory</i> package to my
+ <i>mumbleTeX v12.0</i> distribution on the <i>Grobble 2024</i>
+ operating system&rdquo;.
+<li> If you need to know how to do something, make clear what your
+ environment is: &ldquo;I want to do <em>x</em> in Plain TeX&rdquo;, or &ldquo;I
+ want to do <em>y</em> in LaTeX running the <i>boggle</i>
+ class&rdquo;. If you thought you knew how, but your attempts are
+ failing, tell us what you&rsquo;ve tried: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve already tried installing
+ the <i>elephant</i> in the <i>minicar</i> directory, and it
+ didn&rsquo;t work, even after refreshing the filename database&rdquo;.
+<li> If something&rsquo;s going wrong within (La)TeX, pretend you&rsquo;re
+ <a href="FAQ-latexbug.html">submitting a LaTeX bug report</a>,
+ and try to generate a <a href="FAQ-minxampl.html">minimum failing example</a>.
+ If your example
+ needs your local <i>xyzthesis</i> class, or some other resource
+ not generally available, be sure to include a pointer to how the
+ resource can be obtained.
+<li> Be as succinct as possible. Your helpers don&rsquo;t usually need to
+ know <em>why</em> you&rsquo;re doing something, just <em>what</em> you&rsquo;re
+ doing and where the problem is.
+</ul>
+<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=askquestion">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=askquestion</a>
+</body>