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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’ve decided where you’re
going to <a href="FAQ-gethelp.html">ask your question</a>, but how do you
phrase it?
<p/>Excellent “general” advice (how to ask questions of anyone) is
contained in
<a href="http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html">Eric Raymond’s article on the topic</a>.
Eric’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’s important to remember that you don’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’t
any comprehensive rules, but a few guidelines may help in the
application of your own common sense.
<ul>
<li> Make sure you’re asking the right people. Don’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’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’re using, or intend to use: “I can’t install
TeX” is as good as useless, whereas “I’m trying to install the
<i>mumbleTeX</i> distribution on the <i>Grobble</i>
operating system” gives all the context a potential respondent
might need. Another common situation where this information is
important is when you’re having trouble installing something new in
your system: “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”.
<li> If you need to know how to do something, make clear what your
environment is: “I want to do <em>x</em> in Plain TeX”, or “I
want to do <em>y</em> in LaTeX running the <i>boggle</i>
class”. If you thought you knew how, but your attempts are
failing, tell us what you’ve tried: “I’ve already tried installing
the <i>elephant</i> in the <i>minicar</i> directory, and it
didn’t work, even after refreshing the filename database”.
<li> If something’s going wrong within (La)TeX, pretend you’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’t usually need to
know <em>why</em> you’re doing something, just <em>what</em> you’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>
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