PhilT_eX

When you are work­ing with LaTeX, it is almost cer­tain that you will even­tu­ally want to do some­thing that you don’t know how to do. What do you do in this sit­u­a­tion? I want to offer a few quick resources that are avail­able for LaTeX trou­bleshoot­ing. To the right of this post, in the links sec­tion, there are links to a few rel­e­vant LaTeX resources, like LaTeX for philoso­phers and so on, so I won’t men­tion them.

Since this post first appeared, I have edited it to include infor­ma­tion in the com­ments, and var­i­ous other things I discovered.

The first thing to do if you find you can’t do some­thing is just google it. This might seem pretty obvi­ous advice, but it works fairly often for sim­ple stuff. For exam­ple, if you had a prob­lem with get­ting cap­tions and labels to work prop­erly in your fig­ure envi­ron­ment, you might google “LaTeX fig­ure envi­ron­ment”. The first hit is for the excel­lent, if basic LaTeX wik­i­book. This tells you, for exam­ple, that the label has to come after the cap­tion for it to ref­er­ence the fig­ure, rather than the sec­tion it sits in. (Shame­less plug: another one of the hits for “LaTeX fig­ure envi­ron­ment is my own on-again-off-again blog, carp­ing on about the same point.)

The LaTeX wik­i­book is good, but it is pretty lim­ited in its scope and depth. The next place you might want to look is the (Not So) Short Intro­duc­tion to LaTeX[PDF]. This is a good intro­duc­tion to LaTeX and full of lots of use­ful infor­ma­tion, exam­ples and so on.

If it’s some par­tic­u­lar pack­age that is giv­ing you dif­fi­culty, con­sult the doc­u­men­ta­tion for the pack­age by search­ing for it on CTAN. A lot of pack­ages have remark­ably good (and beau­ti­fully type­set) doc­u­men­tion. For exam­ple, the mem­oir doc­u­ment style has over­whelm­ingly com­plete doc­u­men­ta­tion. Kevin Kle­ment pointed out that putting for exam­ple “tex­doc mem­oir” in to your favourite terminal/command line will open up the doc­u­men­ta­tion on mem­oir. tex­doc works for most LaTeX pack­ages. (If you don’t like the pdf viewer tex­doc uses, you can change it. See this.)

Alas, not all pack­ages are so well doc­u­mented and some­times you need to resort to other mea­sures. If you have a spe­cific ques­tion and none of the above resources have helped, I highly rec­om­mend ask­ing the ques­tion on Stack­Over­flow (if it is sort of pro­gram­ming related) or on Supe­rUser if it is a lit­tle more gen­eral. The dis­tinc­tion between the two is a lit­tle vague, but they’re quick to move your ques­tion over if it’s in the “wrong” one. Since writ­ing this post orig­i­nally, the TeX and friends Stack Exchange site has gone into pub­lic beta. While you can still ask ques­tions on SO or SU above, this new site is prob­a­bly the best place to ask your questions.

Another place where you might ask your LaTeX related ques­tions is The LaTeX com­mu­nity forum.

Another new option that Char­lie just pointed out to me is our very own Phil­TeX forum which should become a more non-programmer friendly place to ask LaTeX related ques­tions. This is a new forum so please do visit it and feel free to ask any ques­tions you might have about any­thing LaTeX related.

So that’s a brief sum­mary of resources I make use of to solve my LaTeX conun­drums. Any addi­tions in the com­ments would be greatly appreciated!