User talk:Mathdudeblacktrenchcoat

Welcome to Wikibooks, Mathdudeblacktrenchcoat!

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  Getting help   Made a mistake?   Goodies, tips and tricks Thanks, DavidCary (discuss • contribs) 18:26, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
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Dear mathdudeblacktrenchcoat,

Imagine that someone is going through your math worksheets and finds some tiny little typo. You want that person to be able to quickly and easily fix that typo, such that the very next person to read that math worksheet sees the corrected version, right?

If your answer is "no, I want to create a big indexed PDF that will be the same for everyone from now until the end of time", then some site other than Wikibooks would work better for you.

Many people are surprised to learn that "formatting" is the very last thing to happen to a real printed book. Authors typically scrawl a lot of words on a lot of notecards, then spend a lot of time arranging and adding and removing notecards. Then editors, compositors, typesetters, and proofreaders adjust the formatting. (Authors are not obligated to do their own formatting or proofreading, which in my opinion is a good thing, because many authors are horrible at it).

Wikibooks is a lot like that. Typically a few people post the raw text and a few other people add some illustrations (see Using Wikibooks for details). Then later other people proofread and tweak the formatting (see Editing Wikitext for details).

In particular, there are a few people that go through and replace "ASCII text mathematical formulas" with amazingly beautiful TeX formatted formulas (see Help:Formulas).

As long as you don't mind other people copying and editing the text you post (see the "license" and "terms of use" links at the bottom of the page for details), I encourage you to go ahead and post what you have now -- it's a lot easier to proofread and fix the formatting after the words and numbers have been posted :-).

--DavidCary (discuss • contribs) 18:26, 2 August 2013 (UTC)