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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> Figures are special, of course.  Sometimes the figure itself is
  <em>really</em> needed, but most problems may be demonstrated with a
  &ldquo;figure substitute&rdquo; in the form of a
  <code>\</code><code>rule{</code><em>width</em><code>}{</code><em>height</em><code>}</code> command, for some value of
  &lt;<i>width</i>&gt; and &lt;<i>height</i>&gt;.  If the (real) figure is needed,
  don&rsquo;t try posting it: far better to put it on the web somewhere.
<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>