/u/nishidh41 pitched an idea a while ago and I took it upon myself to initiate and organise this challenge. I was supposed to make this post on Friday but I was kinda busy, so here we are.

What is this challenge about?

Every challenge will include an image result (screenshot or converted from PDF) of a particularly interesting or tricky piece of LaTeX. Contestants will attempt to guess it and post their LaTeX code side by side with a PNG showing how it appears on their end. The winners will be announced in the next challenge together with the code used to create the challenge. Extra points for elegancy, concision and legibility.

Occasionally, we will have thematic challenges, such as timelines, CVs, invoice, cover letter &c. Ideas for themes always welcome.

I'll try to ballpark the difficulty of the challenge and include it in the title (eg [Intermediate]) so you'll know what to expect. This way, we can encourage participation of beginners and experts alike.

What do we do now?

Right now I am looking for ideas for our first challenge. If you have a neat LaTeX snippet in mind, PM me. Please try to keep it concise but tricky. Even better if it's a nice trick we can incorporate into our workflows.

I'm also accepting pictures with no known code/answer for challenges where we try to visually approximate it.

What are the rules?

• I believe it's better to stick to English locale with Computer Modern as our uniform font for consistency's sake.

• I'll try to avoid domain specific packages as much as possible (eg chess, crossword, molecular representations) to keep it actually interesting and LaTeXy.

• OCR is highly frowned upon. Because, come on.

• If the code you sent is used in a challenge, you'll be (naturally) disqualified from that challenge but will be credited in the post.

I will put up the first challenge some day next week, depending on interest and post the following challenges on that day of the week thereafter.

This is just a prototype at the moment; feedback welcome in comments.

tl;dr: just send me code for now