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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX
The indexes and documentation files in your TEX installation and on CTAN are the primary online resource for self-help on specific packages, and you should read these carefully before asking questions about packages.
If you haven’t used online help before, please read Eric Steven Raymond’s advice in How To Ask Questions The Smart Way (Raymond, 2014) which will save you and the volunteers who answer you a lot of time.
Will Robertson posted on Twitter: ‘Some recent LATEX experiences that made me happy’ (see sidebars).
Matching the font I was supposed to use in the template but having it also be sized sensibly when I write maths:
\usepackage[matchlowercase]{tgheros}
\renewcommand\familydefault{\sfdefault}(See the example ‘Try setting up fonts by fontname’ below for more on the scaling of fonts.)
A single line to have sane caption formatting (in particular to visually identify the caption vs the surrounding text):
\usepackage[format=hang,font=small,
tableposition=top]{caption}(See § 4.2.2 below for more on tables, figures, and captions.)
Alphabetical loading of packages FTW:
\usepackage{amsmath,biblatex,booktabs,censor,
enumitem,geometry,graphicx,siunitx}Just makes it easier to see whether or not you’ve loaded a particular package.
The biblatex package continuing to make it oh so easy to customise reference lists:
\renewcommand\bibfont{\small}
\renewcommand\bibitemsep{0pt}‘Surely I can squeeze one more line onto this page?’ Yes I can:
\enlargethispage\baselineskip
(Try that in MS Word, hah!)
‘Surely this figure could nudge into the margins and no-one would notice?’ Yes:
\vspace*{-1.5cm}
\centerline{\includegraphics
[width=1.1\linewidth]{flowchart}}[No commentary required]
![\[T^{(k)}_n=T^{k-1)}_n+\frac{S^*_n}{0.4132}{\mbox{mean}\atop{j}}\biggl(\psi\Bigl(\frac{m_j-T^{k-1)}_n}{S^*_n}\Bigr)\biggr)\]](images/will-robertson-math.png)
‘Oops, this paper is double-blind reviewed, how do I blank out the things I need to make it anonymous?’ — thank you censor package and \censor command for making it so easy.
A very valuable list of Dos and Donts is maintained on StackExchange listing the most common mistakes that newcomers make. Once you’ve got started with LATEX, especially if you have learned it informally from colleagues, it’s worth having a look at this just to make sure you avoid the easiest pitfalls.
If you want to send an example of what you’re trying to do to one of the forums, mailing lists, or newsgroups listed here, you MUST send an Minimal [Non-]Working Example (MWE). This is your LATEX document pared right down to the bare metal: remove all non-relevant packages, all non-relevant commands and formatting, and send ONLY the absolute bare minimum necessary to show what doesn’t work. Unless you do this, you are wasting everyone’s time, including your own.
There is an excellent article by Nicola Talbot at http://tug.ctan.org/info/dickimaw/dickimaw-minexample.pdf which explains the procedure in fine detail (Talbot, 2014).
And guess what? While doing this, you often find you discover for yourself what the problem was, saving you and thousands of others the trouble of working it out afresh!
For general queries you should read the Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ) document so that you avoid wasting your time and others’ by asking about things for which there is already an easily-accessible answer.
The web site http://tex.stackexchange.com is a carefully-managed and well-structured question-and-answer site for TEX and LATEX. You can vote answers up or down according to their quality or usefulness, but there are strict rules about how you ask questions, the same as for comp.text.tex below.
The Discord web site and the associated app (most devices) is a chat and discussion system originally aimed at the gaming community, but it now has a very active and useful server for TEX and LATEX.
Another support resource is the mailing list TEXhax. Again, feel free to ask questions, but again, try to answer the question yourself first (and say what you’ve tried in your message).
TEX Users Group (TUG), as well as most local user groups, maintains a web site (http://www.tug.org) with lots of information about various aspects of the TEX system and details of support groups, conferences, and journals in many languages and cultures. See the appendix ‘User Groups’ below for information on joining TUG.
The Usenet newsgroup comp.text.tex is the principal forum for other questions and answers about TEX and LATEX, as well as the principal place where new CTAN packages are announced.
Feel free to ask questions, but please do not ask frequently-asked questions: read the FAQ instead. The people who answer the questions do so voluntarily, unpaid, and in their own time. It is also important that for specific queries you include a Minimal [Non-]Working Example — a very short whole LATEX file that others can download and typeset, to see exactly what your problem is.
There is a very detailed guide to how to get the best out of asking questions on Usenet at http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro.
To access Usenet news, type news:comp.text.tex into your browser’s
‘Location’ or
‘Address’ window. If
your browser doesn’t support Usenet news, install one of the
many free newsreaders from the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders).
Google Groups also provides access to Usenet newsgroups
(https://groups.google.com/g/comp.text.tex),
but it is a web interface, not a newsreader in the normal
sense of the word, and lacks most of the normal features of
a newsreader.
There is a Google Groups mailing list for LATEX users at http://groups.google.com/group/latexusersgroup.
If you need commercial levels of support, such as a 24-hour phone contact, or macro-writing services, you can contact a consultancy which deals with TEX (details are on the TUG Web site and in issues of TUGboat).
