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Being new to this stack, I'm curious whether the community welcomes questions that present a problem and (working) solution, and subsequently ask whether there are better alternatives to the approach taken.

For example, in my first question, I later posted an answer. Say I had been able to arrive at that solution on my own: Would the question of whether the approach could be improved be on-topic?

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  • 3
    See also: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/706/55879 and meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/3969/55879. There's also the {best-practices} tag. It seems like the answer is nuanced, but I think such questions can be beneficial. Nov 4, 2015 at 2:41
  • Related: Tagging “Please improve my code” posts
    – Werner Mod
    Nov 4, 2015 at 6:32
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    I'm not really a fan of such questions, as it really open-ended (or too broad). Answers can be as simple as "No, that's the best you can do" to 10 answers each doing it in different ways. You may even have both these options (no + a bunch of yes's and/or alternatives) in the same set of answers.
    – Werner Mod
    Nov 4, 2015 at 6:34
  • Thanks @ArunDebray, those are helpful. Nov 4, 2015 at 13:25
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    Thanks @Werner, now that you mention it I can see how opinionated that could get. I think that if I do come across a reason to ask a similar question, I'll keep it a little more focused. E.g. perhaps, "Is there an existing package that could make this more convenient?" Nov 4, 2015 at 13:28

2 Answers 2

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I'm not really a fan of such questions, as it remains really open-ended (or too broad). Answers can be as simple as "No, that's the best you can do" to 10 answers each doing it in different ways. You may even have both these options (no + a bunch of yes's and/or alternatives) in the same set of answers, depending on the end-user's expertise, making it somewhat opinion-based.

Related to this, here's the vote-to-close reasons that fall within the scope of such questions:

  • too broad

    There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.

  • primarily opinion-based

    Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.

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Not really; Codereview.SX exists and has a {TeX} tag.

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    which has almost no actual TeX related questions no? Mostly deriving TeX code via lua, perl and so on
    – percusse
    Nov 11, 2015 at 18:23

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