Your special moments in TeX - LaTeX StackExchange

Question

This question does not relate to TeX or LaTeX.

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I wish the question is answered not only by high-reputation users, but also users having lower-reputation. Once you have enough reputation to answer, I'm looking forward to your answer!

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Hi everyone!

No matter how long you have been on TeX.SE, you must have many special and nearly-unforgettable moments here. Now let's show your feelings in such moments, by answering some of the following questions, or even your own questions, if you like:

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How do you feel when...

1. you made your first question on TeX.SE?

2. for the first time, one of the answers of your question really helped you / solved your problem(s)?

3. for the first time, one of your answers helped people and was marked accepted?

4. you got the first downvote?

5. you were awarded the Association Bonus

6. for the first time, you reached 200 reputations without the Association Bonus?

7. you got the first gold badge?

8. you reached 1,000; 10,000; 100,000; 500,000 reputations?

9. you became a moderator?

10. etc.

Answer 1

1. I was a bit disappointed because nobody answered (I answered by myself after some time: Problem with authoryear-icomp and ibidem in citation using BibLaTeX)

2. I'm really proud of this question: \makecell in the header: how to get rid of the space after the last column of the table? because years after I used it to answer another question: pgfplotstable - remove space before first and after last column - @{}

3. I was happy and surprised

4. I don't remember the first, it makes me sad once when I tried to answer a very unclear question and the user replied my answer was poor and downvoted it

5. I awarded the Association Bonus on other sites because I'm trusted here, I think it's a sensible feature

6. I was happy, but it rarely happens

7. I don't remember

8. I was happy to reach the 20,000 points to have all the privileges

9. I'm not a moderator

10. the biggest satisfaction: to steal a tick to egreg with a simple answer: Iterate over an array

Answer 2

1. Er…

2. Er…

3. My first answer got accepted the day after it was published. I don't think I paid much attention to reputation, but I felt happy to have been helpful.

4. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/18234/4427 earned my first downvote, but it was compensated by a 200 bounty for https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/18299/4427. Some downvotes have left me a bit puzzled. ;-)

5. No bonus, this is the first StackExchange site I subscribed to.

6. Nine days after first contact. No recollection, as I said, I didn't even know what rep is.

7. Legendary a few months after association, but Martin Scharrer beat me to be the first getting it.

8. Big party for 100K! And 700K a few days ago. I was quite proud to have reached 20000, too, because it opened access to every tool.

9. I'm not a moderator.

10. Overtaking every high rep user has always been very satisfying. :-) I've not overtaken one high rep user, he has always been behind me except for the first days. ;-)

Answer 3

I do not think that I am really qualified to answer, but just to make a start. Most of the things I actually do not remember except for :

1. When I asked my first question, I was impressed by the friendliness of the users who commented and/or answered. (I was expecting an answer of the sort: "Come on, that's absolutely trivial, how can one not know this?", but got a really nice and friendly answer.)
2. N/A
3. I just looked up my first accepted answer. Well, looking at it now I'd say a comment would have done as good a job. (Of course I could use the excuse that at that time I could not comment on posts by others. ;-)
4. No recollection. I only recall the most crazy downvote, which I got because I told another user that it is not OK to sell my answer as his. If this question is about downvotes cast by me, the site says I cast 6 of them, out of which I only remember 3. They were for (IMHO really gross cases of) academic dishonesty.
5. No recollection.
6. No recollection.
7. No recollection.
8. I hardly remember how I felt when I reached 100k or 500k, not even sure it happened. ;-) Other than that, I don't recall any special emotion when I reached any of the 10^n scores. However, after joining the chat started to look whether or not my score hits a paliprime (palindrome prime). This is because that is sort of ironic. A prime has a meaning regardless of whether we are using decimal, binary, hexadecimal or what ever scheme to write our numbers, but clearly a palindrome does depend on this.

Just an anecdote: I never really cared for reputation so I did not check how much reputation one gets for what. I was under the impression that you earn more reputation if you answer a question that has more votes. Therefore I thought it was shabby to upvote questions that I am going to answer, and did not do that. So I'd like to apologize to all of those whose questions I answered and did not upvote. (Now I cannot do that since there is a chance it will be considered serial voting. ;-)

Answer 4

I'm always having special moments on TeXExchange when I witness another example of this particular community being distinguishedly more user- and newbie-friendly than any other of the StackExchange communities I know (and there is no particularly un-friendly community I know either).

You guys can be really proud of this!

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Update

My Question No. 11...

11. How did you feel after answering some specific questions and why?

I remember to have felt quite satisfied with myself after clicking 'Save' when I wrote these two answers[^1]. This may sound very strange to you, but when you read below, maybe you can understand:

• Detecting all pages which contain color
• Export PDF for two printer - one PDF with just the pictures, the other one with the text

Both involved new features which had recently been added to Ghostscript. In both cases I had discovered a road to answer related questions only because I had had a close look at Ghostscript's published changelogs. These new features where/are not widely published or known in the internet -- so my answers remain one of the few places were you find details about them.

Since I'm growing old, my brain power is deteriorating and I do not remember things very well or for long: I tend to 'search-engine' for some topics again and again -- and these two answers came up in my own googling more than once, and they served me well each time... haha!

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_{[^1]: The answers here may not have been the first or only occasion I provided them publically. But this site sticks with me for its prominence in Google and for the friendliness of its community.}

Answer 5

I am definitely not a super-user as far as LalalalaTeX is concerned :)

But I do think I have my moments of joy:

1. Not so long ago, when I got so frustrated because of the figures/tables/captions getting automatically shifted to a new page or unpreffered locations (with a SW whose name one should not utter), I decided "that's it, from now on, I am going to use whatever TeX that works for me". At that time, I had no idea about our LalalalaTeXs. I just started with pdftex, coincidence ;) and no idea how to use it. This made me ask my first question (again I just got bumped into this site by accident): How to include headers in first page of list of tables ,contents, etc. Also I remember deleting some questions during that time (of course due to embarrasements for asking a stupid question).

2. My first answer was for my second question (when looking at the transcript).

3. Feeling more stupid now, and also similar as @marmot comment.

4. Do not remember anymore.

5. Suddenly something popped-up saying you got +100, I was like "okay, good!". But at that time, I had no idea why I was awarded that though.

6. Do not remember anymore.

7. Do not remember anymore.

8. I recently reached 10^3 and it was a nice feeling indeed. In a manner, atleast my knowledge is useful for someone in a (x,y,z,t(x,y,z)) (in the earth).

x. Over time, I was thrilled to learn what the things I could do with TeX, still striking!!

Answer 6

How do you feel when...

1. you made your first question on TeX.SE?

It was not my first question that impressed me the most but the third: It was answered by two eminent contributors who dazzled me with their knowledge of TeX. What are tokens used for?

2. for the first time, one of the answers of your question really helped you / solved your problem(s)?

Relieved.

3. for the first time, one of your answers helped people and was marked accepted?

It was an answer I knew perfectly well because I had spent hours on this error when I started LaTeX. I was glad to have answered before the high-profile contributors. :-)

4. you got the first downvote?

I don't remember that. How can we find the first downvote?

5. you were awarded the Association Bonus

Highly reputable contributors told me that one of my questions was not about TeX and to go elsewhere. It didn't please me. Finally, I went there and got a 100-point bonus. It comforted me. :-)

6. for the first time, you reached 200 reputations without the Association Bonus?

No memories. Oh yes, it happened to me very recently and only once. I have difficulty understanding this voting system because I have written very simple answers that have been over upvoted for no reason (in my opinion) and difficult answers that have had no vote (although they deserve it). The voting system questions me more than anything else: what does it represent?

7. you got the first gold badge?

My one and only gold badge was easy to get: just come here for 100 consecutive days. It looks pretty on the screen. It's a nice color.

8. you reached 1,000; 10,000; 100,000; 500,000 reputations?

The first time I reached 1000, I was very surprised. And with each passing to the next thousand just as much.

9. you became a moderator?

Given my difficulties with the English language, this is not likely to happen.

10. When did you start reading the TeXbook?

I was very intrigued by the modification of the tokens and wondered why Donald Knuth did it. Since that day, I would like to ask him two questions and I hope he will answer (before he disappears):

• For what purpose did you permit the modification of the tokens? Is it to make TeX a very low level language from which it is possible to create others like TikZ?
• Why did not you copy the C or Pascal calculation capabilities into TeX?