Re: Interesting thing to try to do

Mark Mephinasony wrote:
Nathan Sanders wrote:
Note: I've never written a LaTeX package, I'm no computer programmer
or even a guru, I've never used either fancyhdr or extramarks before,
and I got this to work on the *first* try just by reading the
documentation.

You also constructed it from scratch.

Of course he did! Most minimal examples are constructed from scratch -- that the error first crops up in an existing document is immaterial. Nobody wants to see your entire document, just a sample of the code that reproduces the error. Copy that from your document and build an example around it in a new file. If there's anything confidential in it, change it.

Indeed, the very process of creating a minimal example can often lead
you to finding your own error, which is part of the reason why its
asked for.

And in the process, I'd destroy the document I'm working on.

If that's what you think I suspect you haven't read the FAQ entry on creating a minimal example:

http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=minxampl

There's absolutely no reason to change a single thing in the document you're working on when creating a minimal example.

That's all fine and dandy when you don't have anything important yet,
but when you're trying to diagnose a problem with a document already
half-written, it's awkward. At minimum, you have to copy it and fork
your project into two in the process, reconfigure your batch files and
everything to use the copy ... you get the picture.

I suppose you can fork your entire project for the sake of creating a minimal example, but it seems like a poor use of CVS (or whatever method you're using to fork) to me. A minimal example should be the smallest chunk of code you can write that reproduces the error and there's no reason for it to become a permanent part of your project (or at least if there is, it's probably more effective to include it as a separate file -- and a good minimal example will almost always consist of one small file).

I've never copied or forked an entire project or reconfigured a single batch file to produce any of the hundreds of minimal examples I've produced. Copy the code that triggers the error -- and *only* that code, be it a single line, a paragraph, a float, or what have you -- into a new document and follow the "building up" process from the FAQ entry. Add gibberish if you need, say, a line break or a page break, but beyond that minimal chunk of code and any packages or macro definitions required to use it, the rest of your project need not -- indeed *should* not -- have anything at all to do with the minimal example. The minimal example is, for all intents and purposes, a very small, completely new, stand-alone project.

Yes it can be a bit of a pain and eat up 30 minutes of your day, but unless you have a very common problem with distinct symptoms (such as trying to view Postscript code with a DVI viewer) it is highly unlikely that your problem will be solved without it. Not because people here demand it in order to gratify their own egos, but because uncommon problems can rarely be solved without seeing the code that causes the problem. As a programmer yourself, you should be well aware of that.

Alan
.

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