How do I draw this.....?

Question

I know this question has been raised before at policy on "how do I draw this?" questions. I know a lot of us are annoyed by these questions. But I'm not so sure, as in the linked discussion, that these sorts of questions add nothing to the site. I believe they could add something if we had an appropriate tag, such as [how-to-draw], or we came up with better titles that might help others doing a search for such things. A tag additionally could then be a place to first direct people to look to see possibly similar figures that they wish to duplicate.

I feel that the learning curve for either TikZ or PSTricks is steep enough that people can generally be quite lost about how to do even the simplest things. I discovered PSTricks many years ago and got to be quite comfortable with it. I began using TikZ about the time I joined this site. Though there are similarities, much is different. For example, I feel, TikZ requires a much deeper understanding of LaTeX's macro expansion process than PSTricks requires. And, for those people who are new to LaTeX and haven't used any of the graphical packages, I think they can feel quite overwhelmed and lost. Some of the answers/comments to TikZ questions are just rather off-putting, like comments that read "it's in the manual". Yes, that may be true, but the manuals are very long or broken across many different documents; finding what you want to do can be extremely challenging.

I've been thinking about this policy of ours for a while. And it seems that increasingly we're becoming less friendly toward people who may just be totally out to sea about how to even start something. Recently I was downvoted for answering such a question---and, I am not complaining about that; I understand the reason---but, that's prompted me to actually go ahead and post this.

Some of us actually enjoy trying to answer such how to draw questions: sometimes just because it challenges our own understanding of TikZ/PSTricks; other times just because it's fun to create the image. New people are always going to come to our site and post these sorts of annoying questions no matter how much we try to discourage it. I generally only answer such question for people with low rep. counts, which I take to be a sign that they may also be novice LaTeX (and family) users.

I'm actually much more bothered by the repeated downvotes for the OP. I feel it casts us in a negative light when so much of what we do it supportive. I don't think it necessary that we view the people posting these questions as vampires (unless it's the same individually repeatedly posting time and time again the same sort of "do this for me" sort of question).

Could we come up with a policy that would make it more forgiving for OPs who may not even know where to start with TikZ/PSTricks? Could we please find a way not to be offended by these questions? After all, no one is saying, "Hey you there, you must answer my post!". They're just reaching out hoping that someone will answer them.

Answer 1

I also discussed this before: Our Do-it-for-me and Draw-it-for-me comments don't reflect our hypocrisy. Can they be improved? and I was under the impression that it was settled. But things have changed since then. Our recent residents are getting really hostile more frequently. There is no other way of putting it. Especially in the chat room I'm witnessing a lot of ah, look at this idiot type of comments on questions and especially drawing attention to a flaming commentary to show off how right they are. And I am actually waiting for the 100th monkey¹ to pick up this nasty behavior and change the color of the spirit here which is happening for some time now.

Maybe we should remind ourselves that this is only TeX we are dealing with. An obscure typesetting system for mostly academic purposes, not a cure for cancer. It is fun and beautiful nothing else. So non-TeX people have all the rights not knowing it. And it looks ridiculous and funny when users occasionally come to this site to ask something and see this small print popping under questions with serious attitude telling to do yada yada yada. There is a difference between letting someone know about the style and registering them to your own club.

I don't find this pretentious oh let's teach him how to fish attitude comfortable. Because if you really want to teach (I don't know where this self-confidence comes from too) you try to be nice, you don't prove how correct you are. If there is a duplicate close it. If there is none let them be. We have more than enough means to deal with unanswered questions.

Housekeeping does not equate to repelling boring questions.

There will always be boring questions. But of course if you feel like TeX-SX is your daily dosage of SuDoKu and you don't like your fun being spoiled by users who are not supplying enough fun, then you get grumpy and belittle questions.

Being an old user or hi-rep doesn't give anyone the right to be the discipline police. Especially some users are quite annoying to be the first one to engage with some new users, piss them off right off the bat and move to the next question where they can fix lacking manners of another user with a hearty Welcome to TeX-SX and then following with here are the ways you fail: code blocks, thank yous, MWEs, usernames. I have been tangentially involved in some of those code block compositions. Nobody back then thought that it would be a tool for the etiquette police.

In the meantime, often times a potential answerer has to deal with a overzealous response of the OP leading to read my question properly type of response because someone pissed that user off before we can finish reading the question.

Here are recent three questions that are too broad (asks specifically a certain plot type) and unclear (really? with two downvotes) and the last one is also interesting because OP said something but failed to make the code work (!?). Just go through review queue there are lots of examples.

Syntax/Railroad diagrams in LaTeX

How to make a Minkowski Diagram

Text Bold with fontspec

Yes, we are very friendly indeed. There you go, evidence you wish evidence you find in there, tons of them.

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If you had the privilege to hang out in Math.Stackexchange you know exactly what I mean above (which is still apparently triggering Oh, I don't see that happening type of turn-the-other-cheek behavior among us). I'm hoping that you won't classify MSE as a user-friendly place. However, amazingly, here is a blog post showing precisely what is going to happen which I tried to hand-wave above.

The icing-on-cake part is in the comments, I hope it rings a bell. Because I'm out of arguments if you still cannot see. Apparently my crystal ball is pretty shiny.

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¹ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect

Answer 2

I don't like this type of question but not because of the "do-it-for-me" -- after all most questions are "do-it-for-me" questions. The problem is that the question is "cheap", in German I would say "hingerotzt". The OP didn't put any effort in it. There is no information about the system he/she used and for what the graphic is needed. No context or anything, only a picture. Even the name of the user is cheap.

Such questions try to get the maximum with minimum costs, and this imho is disrespectful towards all the generous people who spent their time to answer questions. I feel exploited by such questions. I want to see in questions at least an indication that the asker is aware that they address persons with a free will to ignore the question and not some slaves or machines bound to answer. A minimal example or some context may not always needed but neither is the tip in a restaurant.

Answer 3

I was going to post this as a response to @UlrikeFischer. But then I realized I was saying something more than just a response, so I decided to make this one more idea to enter as an answer as part of this discussion.

Much like in math, when a new field of inquiry opens up, the initial results are relatively quick and easy to solve; as the field develops the results become harder to find and solve, and require ever deeper levels of mastery (and/or cunning).

Similarly, here on TeX-SX, many of the easy questions have been asked and answered. That's not to say such easy questions are still not laying around waiting to be asked. But, for the interested learner of LaTeX (and family), most questions they might come up with have likely already be posted and answered. And thanks to some of the giants on this site, we have some very thorough and elucidating answers (or comments).

Certainly as new packages get developed and attract new users, those rudimentary questions will open up once more. But meanwhile, the questions either become rather abstruse and rarefied, or they are the questions of those---most likely---completely at a loss of where to start.

Personally, I would like to see two developments on this site. One is to develop a repository of well presented solutions to common typographical features: among which would be the creation of diagrams and charts using TikZ, pstricks, Metapost, etc. (more on this in the paragraphs below). The second development is really outside of the scope of the posted question; nevertheless, I'll mention it: a collection of questions and answers on best practices (yes, I know this will result in a lot of opinions, but still I think those could be useful to learners).

Here's one approach I've been thinking of regarding the development of such repositories inspired a bit by @cfr 's comment to my original post.

cfr suggests that the user simplify the diagram or pair down the question. I think this is a great idea. But also, I think some of these posters might just turn around and say, "I don't know how to start any of this." My suggestion is not to make the OP simplify the diagram. Instead, we, as the more seasoned users of this site and more seasoned users of the tools, could create new questions and post answers that breakdown the OP's original question into stages. On the one hand, this creates a bit of work. On the other, it allows us to structure things in a way that is better organized and searchable than a newbie might know how to do.

For example, take the following question Draw a picture where some parts are tables. It can be broken down into various parts. The tables on the left hand side could be structured in TikZ as split rectangles. The table in the center could import a tabular environment into the picture for which there is already a good answer though I'd like to see a way of doing it as a TikZ matrix or a two-way split rectangle(??). The right hand side could just be viewed as drawing connectors between the node: a rather rudimentary level sort of thing to do in TikZ or pstricks, but I don't think we have anything illustrating plainly how to do this except buried in other questions and therefore not readily searchable.

My suggestion is that a solution be posted for each of these aspects of the picture. While we do have some questions about working with split nodes, we don't really have a question which is "how do I draw a split node?" So, we in-the-know could post such a question (perhaps as a community wiki). Then we could answer our own question illustrating the technique (again perhaps as a community wiki). But then this would also allow others to come in and showcase how to do the similar technique in pstricks of Metapost. Then we could go back to the OP's question and in the comments (or in a solution) link to the new posting or show how to integrate the various ideas. In fact, my own question about Setting a length with a key to a TikZ node came up in an initial foray into answering the question about drawing the diagram mentioned at the start of the previous paragraph (I haven't posted anything yet about this because I just haven't had that sort of procrastination time available). In this manner we would gradually build up respositories of techniques. (Right now I can recall seeing many cool things done with TikZ, but then the question is how do I find it 9 months later and when I finally have a project where the cool thing would be useful. Afterall, the original question could have been about something rather tangential to whatever coolness might have been there.)

I know this can be a lot of work. It could get a bit haphazard too. But I think it might offer a solution to how to make these "draw this picture for me" into something more general and useful to current and future users of the site.

Answer 4

I agree with Ulrike in her perspective.

The problems I've noticed are various. I understand that being polite is good and I often try to word the (few) comments I post in a neutral manner. And I'm also lenient to new users (especially completely new ones). But being polite and lenient doesn't mean and/or justify feeding the vampires.

While I really love Tikz, really, I think that answering the "gimme teh codez" questions is not only not helpful to the OP (in the long term), but it's also harmful to the site in the way that we are simply a free workforce for people too lazy to even describe their problem, let alone post some code attempt.

I don't demand that the code being posted works excellently, but I appreciate that there is an effort. It also depends on the case, I've answered questions without codes where I thought it was appropriate. Maybe I'm even wrong in those cases, but it was my call. And indeed, it's not even a "is there a code in it?" problem. It's more of a "do I think this user attempted to look into it before asking?" which is often not the case.

And it often happens that when I'm looking for how to answer a "draw it for me" question (for my own curiosity), I stumble upon very related and sometimes exact duplicates of the same question. This means that the OP didn't even take the time to google the general problem, let alone dig into the code.

By the way, I don't find these questions to be boring. Any Tikz-related question is fun for me (and often I resist the urge to just post an answer). What I don't appreciate is the thought that I'm almost supposed to give an answer when the OP only posted an image with some "Any help is appreciated. Thanks." with no context, no effort whatsoever or even a slight mention of said effort.