Update: Question posted at Contest: Show Off Your Skillz in TeX & Friends [TeX.sx birthday].
Contest suggestion
Show off your LaTeX skillz
Show off the LaTeX knowledge you've gathered over the years, include things that a more-or-less everyday document can benefit from.
- two-page (A4 oder letter) document
- Should mainly be text, but content doesn't matter -- feel free to show the most beautiful lorem ipsum ever. Reuse of something you have already written earlier is fine as well.
- Include whatever visual stimuli you can think of, e.g. figures, tables, margin notes, background pictures, drop caps / initials ... but in the end, it has to look good, not cluttered.
- Make it typographically, aesthetically and perhaps even funwise maximally appealing. the vote is likely to be pretty subjective at any rate
- TeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX etc. are allowed, too, but I'd like to limit the "ingredients" to things provided on CTAN or otherwise easily publicly and freely available, so that everybody can reproduce and compile the document.
- The source must be included, optimally extensively annotated so that non-expert users can understand which package and which hack does what. This should be taken into consideration for the voting as well.
- The source (i.e. the the LaTeX code, not necessarily the text itself) must be published under some license that allows for easy reuse -- suggestions welcome, I'm not an expert in this field.
Please make suggestions to these conditions! We might want to allow for more pages if a title page, ToC, LoF, LoT, an index / glossary, bibliography etc. are included.
In order to avoid "cheating", i.e. stealing other people's ideas, we have to find some way to get around this. As I think the contest will take place in a separate question on meta (or on the main site?), I suggest everybody posts their document + code, and deletes it immediately. When the deadline is over, the question gets locked and all the answers are undeleted, thus made visible again and the voting can start and users can vote for like a week.
My idea is to see some of the experts on here actually applying their enormous knowledge to a sort of "everyday" project. I'm expecting many useful packages, a number of nice hacks, perhaps some things you wouldn't necessarily include in a bone-dry scientific paper but that look nice after all. Hopefully, users will be able to draw some inspiration from these documents and improve their everyday LaTeX use a bit. In a way, this should be a very personal and subjective best of our best-practices questions, but once again, I'd also like to encourage things that are a bit wild. We might even get new questions out of this project, e.g. "How does x work?" or "Is it advisable to do y?".
Questions:
Alright, this idea seems to be decently popular. A few questions:
Will my idea about avoiding "cheating" work the way I described it? 20k+ users might see deleted posts, but I'm confident they wouldn't cheat.
Should the contest be a question on meta or on the main site? I tend to put it on the main site, just to get more attention. I could explicitly say that that question would generally be of an inappropriate format for tex.sx, but this is an "officially approved exception".
- Putting it on the main site will probably give the participants a lot of reputation, but I don't think this is a problem. If it were, it could be avoided by putting the question on meta, since meta rep doesn't really matter.
