Is it ok to change an OP's question to fit an answer?

Question

An interesting issue has arisen with the question How to use Georgia as a font in LaTeX? In the OP's original question, (s)he demonstrates with a code snippet how (s)he is able to use the Georgia font in lualatex with fontspec, a procedure that obviously wouldn't work in pdflatex. The OP is now asking how one can use the Georgia font with latex, and explicitly mentions that (s)he is not asking how to do this with xelatex or lualatex (which the OP already knows the answer to).

Someone has provided a long answer, but this answer focuses almost exclusively on how to use the Georgia font with xelatex/lualatex, which the OP explicitly said (s)he wasn't asking for. I pointed this out in a couple of comments to the answer.

Now, the author of the answer agrees with my feedback, but nevertheless feels that his/her own answer would be useful enough for someone who wanted to know how to use Georgia in xelatex/lualatex that the answer should stand.

Since the OP's question and the provided answer now don't match very well, the author of the answer decides to alter the OP's question to fit the answer (s)he himself/herself provided.

My aim is not to raise this as an issue for this specific incident, but it can stand as an example of a general question: When a question is clear and well formulated, is it ok to change it in order to fit an answer that strictly speaking does not answer the question, only because the answer would be a good answer to a different question?

Answer 1

In the situation you described I should say "absolutely not".

In my opinion, the correct way to act, to not waste the answer, is that the answerer should ask a new question where to put his/her answer and delete the original answer.

In this way the original question remains unanswered (someone else will answer, seeing its status) and the original answer is recorded for future users.

Answer 2

Thanks for bringing this up. I’ll defer to the consensus here if there is one.

My interpretation of the original question was, “I want to use Georgia in LaTeX and use different TeX engines. Here’s a MWE I came up with that works in all but one TeX engine. How do I use it in the remaining TeX engine?”

The intent, it seemed to me, was more to use Georgia in any TeX engine. I was specifically motivated to post this answer here because a friend of mine asked for my advice on TeX formatting, and when she searched for how to use Georgia in LaTeX, this question came up. I wanted to post my answer to her here, where it would also help other people with the same question.

Unfortunately, the original question is poorly-phrased in two ways. First, it uses “latex” as an alias for the PDFLaTeX executable, which isn’t wrong, but causes ambiguity. People searching for an answer more often want to know about the LaTeX kernel running on any TeX engine. At least one person I know has already had that problem.

Second, it’s phrased too narrowly. As written, it totally excludes any answer that would be helpful to the vast majority of people asking. There are legitimate reasons to use PDFLaTeX over LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX: you need DVI output, you need 100% compatibility with classic TeX, you like it and don’t want to change, your professor orders you to because she likes it and doesn’t want to change, and so on. However, since the OP also tried LuaLaTeX first, I think the last sentence may have been more limiting than they themselves might have wanted if their own question had come up in a search.

In short, I didn’t think the literal wording of the original question should be enforced to make the answer less useful to most people reading it. If the OP was asking about “latex” and ordering answers not to mention the most common LaTeX engines at all? Well, then they should not have done that in the first place. But splitting off a new question might be a solution.

So, should I make a new question and self-answer?