What is the balance between test cases and minimalism in a MWE?
I recently wrote a question with a MEW I thought was pretty good. One example, nice and clear what the issue is, but it gave me an answer that doesn't work, so I'm wondering if I wrote it badly.
Reading The top response to it emphasis minimalism a lot, and I think I did a pretty good job there. (I could have removed a couple lines from the example citation, and condensed the usepackage command, but other then that I think it is as to the point as a question about line-breaking can be.)
However, the answer I got doesn't work, despite clearly having been tested, since the author only tested changing the length of the DOI = part of the bibliography.
Now, while I was working on the MWE, I did have a couple of examples in there. But each one takes up a lot of text, and I wanted to try and be a good user of the stackexchange and include as little as possible. Should I include more examples in future?
I included this as the example:
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{\jobname.bib}
@inproceedings{Meshlab,
booktitle = {Eurographics Italian Chapter Conference},
editor = {Vittorio Scarano and Rosario De Chiara and Ugo Erra},
title = {{MeshLab: an Open-Source Mesh Processing Tool}},
author = {Cignoni, Paolo and Callieri, Marco and Corsini, Massimiliano and Dellepiane, Matteo and Ganovelli, Fabio and Ranzuglia, Guido},
year = {2008},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-905673-68-5},
DOI = {10.2312/LocalChapterEvents/ItalChap/ItalianChapConf2008/129-136}
}
For example, I could change the .bib file to read:
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{\jobname.bib}
@inproceedings{Meshlab,
booktitle = {Eurographics Italian Chapter Conference},
editor = {Vittorio Scarano and Rosario De Chiara and Ugo Erra},
title = {{MeshLab: an Open-Source Mesh Processing Tool}},
author = {Cignoni, Paolo and Callieri, Marco and Corsini, Massimiliano and Dellepiane, Matteo and Ganovelli, Fabio and Ranzuglia, Guido},
year = {2008},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-905673-68-5},
DOI = {10.2312/LocalChapterEvents/ItalChap/ItalianChapConf2008/129-136}
}
@inproceedings{Meshlab2,
booktitle = {Eurographics Italian Chapter Conference},
editor = {Vittorio Scarano and Rosario De Chiara and Ugo Erra},
title = {{MeshLab: an Open-Source Mesh Processing Tool}},
author = {Cignoni, Paolo and Callieri, Marco and Corsini, Massimiliano and Dellepiane, Matteo and Ganovelli, Fabio and Ranzuglia, Guido},
year = {2008},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-905673-68-5},
DOI = {10.2312/LocalChapterEvents/ItalChap}
}
@inproceedings{Meshlab3,
booktitle = {Eurographics Italian Chapter Conference},
editor = {Vittorio Scarano and Rosario De Chiara and Ugo Erra},
title = {{MeshLab: an Open-Source Mesh Processing Tool}},
author = {Cignoni, Paolo and Callieri, Marco and Corsini, Massimiliano and Dellepiane, Matteo and Ganovelli, Fabio and Ranzuglia, Guido},
year = {2008},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-905673-68-5},
DOI =
{10.2312/LocalChapterEvents/ItalChap/ItalianChapConf2008/ItalianChapConf2008/129-136}
}
@Article{ellip,
author ="Brown, Matthew L. and Van Wieren, Ken and Tailor, Hamel N. and Hartling, David and Jean, Anthony and Merbouh, Nabyl",
title ="Three-dimensional printing of ellipsoidal structures using Mercury",
journal ="CrystEngComm",
year ="2018",
volume ="20",
issue ="3",
pages ="271--274",
publisher ="The Royal Society of Chemistry",
doi ="10.1039/C7CE01901G",
}
@article{ModelHistory,
author = {Peterson, Quentin R.},
title = {Some reflections on the use and abuse of molecular models},
journal = {J.~Chem.~Ed.},
volume = {47},
number = {1},
pages = {24},
year = {1970},
doi = {10.1021/ed047p24},
}
\end{filecontents}
That shows off each error I get with the answer (and the three cases the author of the example provided that shows it works), but now the MWE lot longer.
I noted that there is a list of *.bib files you can use that come with TeXLive. So I tried to construct a MWE example using the files from it. biblatex-examples.bib only has two examples with a DOI, neither which show the behaviours I want. I ran a search for DOI on all the *.bib files in my TeXLive2020 folder, and found a few other files I could use, but those tended to need additional code to work (I needed to add a definition of \BibLaTeX in one case, for example), and several of them generate a ton of errors such as warning: undefined macro "Leipzig" in archaeologie-examples.bib, which seems bad for a MWE. So I think that is out.
So, should I have included multiple entries in my *.bib files in future, so that I don't get answers that work with only that entry? Or should I keep my MWEs as minimal as possible to make them easier to read?
\raggedright(which I'm surprised doesn't work always) or a usual penalty balancing trick, which again is general. The actual penalty may need adjusting to handle more tricky cases but I think it is misleading to say the people answering only addressed the specific example not the general issue. I agree with Barbara that this is a duplicate of your other question\raggedrightto be a real answer since it turns justification off, which will dramatically change the look of the references section. If I remade the question I would specify that it isn't an option, I thought massive changes to document appearance would be assumed to be outside the scope of the solution. I'm talking about part two which has uses a\hfilas, per their comment, they didn't consider what would happen with a short DOI on a mostly empty line (a very common situation).\hspace{0pt plus 2cm}or whatever.And certainly setting bibliographies ragged is very common and with the question as written it is the standard answer.