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I would like to know how one uploads files to a question so that people can download full working examples?

I was trying to explain my last question, and while people were fast to criticize the form of my response, they didn't read my explanation that the question space was too small to put the full file. That would save a lot of explanation.

migrated from tex.stackexchange.com Aug 6 '14 at 17:12

This question came from our site for users of TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and related typesetting systems.

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    The whole idea of a minimal working example is to minimise the code just leaving the needed information to reproduce a given problem and nothing more. – Johannes_B Aug 6 '14 at 17:13
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    Take your time grasshopper. No need to hurry. :-) – Johannes_B Aug 6 '14 at 17:13
  • again, the original question here is how to upload files? Can you answer that? – daemondave Aug 6 '14 at 17:14
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    I think it is impossible to upload text files. – Johannes_B Aug 6 '14 at 17:15
  • the reason why someone might want to show the entire file is - not knowing what's important to cut - provide the expert with all the detail. The answers given to my question did not work, due to the limited 30000 chars, I could not provide more detail. – daemondave Aug 6 '14 at 17:17
  • ok well that's disappointing. Thanks for answering the question. – daemondave Aug 6 '14 at 17:18
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    On the risk of getting mad, has somebody given you the link to minimal working example (MWE). there you can find out how to procede now. – Johannes_B Aug 6 '14 at 17:19
  • whats to get mad about? I am asking for help not criticizing the help... – daemondave Aug 6 '14 at 17:20
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    The link @Johannes_B provided, especially this part, offers possibilities on minimalizing your code. Within 30000+ characters there is definitely room for minimizing. Please consider, that people are helping you for free - so it would be good if you were polite and prepare some preliminary work. – Hackbard_C Aug 6 '14 at 17:25
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    There are thousands of filesharers service where you can upload files. But before doing this you should really consider if it is appropriate to expect that someone wade through a big amount of code and so make an real effort to shorten the code. Even if you don't know what is important: you can cut out a lot of things by simply commenting code and trying out what happens. That's tedious but not difficult. If you don't want to spent the time: pay someone. – Ulrike Fischer Aug 6 '14 at 17:27
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    Reducing the code to a MWE is more or less O(log(n)), where n is the number of lines. It's cheap enough that you should not expect potential answerers to do it for you. – jub0bs Aug 8 '14 at 11:43
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Well, there's no such possibility on StackExchange. Every post is limited to 30kB of text, and a bunch of figures, if you wish.

Why? Well, there's couple reasons (most of them were already summarized in the comments):

  1. StackExchange can't host large files. Once you allow them, there's be a large lot of them, and that's at least very expensive.

  2. Users aren't willing to download untrusted contents. And they shouldn't be. It's not an issue with LaTeX that much, it's quite difficult to demage a computer from within a LaTeX file, but SE often deals with languages where cat /dev/random | dd > SOMETHING can damage your computer within milliseconds. It's easy to eye-verify a short piece of code, but not large files.

  3. There's very hardly a question that can't be stated within 30kB. In LaTeX, most problems are of the form: "I don't know how to do XYZ," or: "Using \bar inside \foo causes an error." Very likely, your question fits into one of these cases. The only necessary thing is to follow the steps in minimal working example (MWE) FAQ and invest your own time into analyzing the problem before asking others to go through large bunches of your code.

  4. There are places where you can upload a file. The more creditted are e.g. Google Drive or Dropbox; for source code, GitHub can be handy, too.

  5. In case you need to provide a 3rd party file. It happens that for instance a university thesis class is troublesome. In that case, it's probably accessible from the university's webpages, so simply link it.

(Marked CW since it contains a summary of suggestions by several people.)

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