Greetings.

I have been asking the LaTeX-Community.org forums for help on formatting issues that I need to have addressed soon.

Unfortunately, just on the basis of interacting with people there, I have found in the last two months that the community tends to resist wanting to help me.

This past October, I posted two inquiries, to modify how to format a few documents (and I really consider these to be small modifications). After two and a half months, I still don't have solutions to my inquiries...

...well, not entirely true.

Here is a thread of interest:

Special Modifications to Bibliography Style • Text Formatting • LaTeX Community

(Note: I've pressed the LaTeX-Community posters for more urgent attention to the matter and they seem to have come up with a solution.)


Here's the problem: If you go to post 13-ish, in that thread, others are telling me that the working example works perfectly fine for them...but it doesn't work for me. When I use MacTeX, I get error messages that the other posters don't get for exactly the same code.


What's going on?

Also: My time to get this project done is running out. That's why I asked these questions 2 months in advance. Where else can I go for help on this?


If anyone is interested, here is the other inquiry:

Custom Entry in ToC • Page Layout • LaTeX Community

^ Edit: I'm still working on this one.

Nevermind, I finally got a poster to help me. Someone delete this thread, I can't do it myself.

[ghporter]

How about sharing the process you learned, so you can help others. Obviously there aren't a lot of LaTeX experts here, so some help for LaTeX users would be useful.

I'm not really sure if there was any process to be learned, that I could then share that would be particularly fruitful for others. It was standard troubleshooting: post a request (i.e. "I need...") and a bare-bones LaTeX script that others can work with, state causes-and-effects from trying specific modifications to the script (if applicable), and wait to see if someone provides a solution.
What in particular would you like me to share?

[ghporter]

We could start with what was different for you that kept the typical process from working for you.

What was different for me was: I needed to meet very particular formatting requirements for my project. Typically, I just come up with a nice format without having to define new environments or re/defining commands. So, this was very different for me, since I have pretty much no experience with command reparameterization.

[ghporter]

Ah, it wasn't "there's this command here that does this..." but more in-depth how-to instructions. OK, that sort of says your challenge was a LaTeX power user thing, not an installation problem or version difference issue.

I'm glad you got your answer. Care to share which discussion forums you querried about this, and which gave you your answer?

For Bibliography-related inquiries, the only forum that I considered was this:

Text Formatting • LaTeX Community

and eventually I got my answer for it.


For Table of Contents-related inquiries, the only forum that I considered was this:

Page Layout • LaTeX Community

and eventually I got my answer for it as well.

[ghporter]

Great, thanks for the links.

[OreoCookie]

I wish I had seen this thread earlier, I'm working with LaTeX for over 10 years now.

The reason why you probably haven't seen a lot of help from the community is that very often the documentation is atrocious. So only a few people actually know the answer. I've tried to customize bibtex styles, but ended up switching to biblatex. Customizing the style there was documented slightly better and done in a more systematic fashion.

If you need help with LaTeX, don't hesitate to post here in the future. (Also feel free to send me a pm.)