Creating a LaTeX minimal example

Author:: Nicola L. C. Talbot
Version:: 1.3
Date:: 2015-10-04
Licence:: GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL)
Contents:: View Table of Contents
Source Code:: Download ZIP archive ( 24K)

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A minimal (or minimum) working example (MWE) is a useful debugging aid if you encounter errors in your LaTeX document. (The “working” part of MWE sometimes causes confusion as the purpose of a MWE is to demonstrate what doesn’t work.) You will likely also be asked to produce a MWE if you post a question on a bug report form or forum post etc asking for help.

This document describes how to create a minimal example either by building up (starting a test document from scratch) or by hacking down (starting with a copy of a non-working document and removing parts that aren’t relevant to the problem).

This document isn’t itself a MWE.

This article was formerly at http://theoval.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~nlct/latex/minexample/.