T_EXgefühl and LAT_EXgefühl

Jeffrey Shallit and Blake Stacey are discussing T_EXgefühl and LAT_EXgefühl, described by Shallit as “the intuitive understanding of what is proper usage in the mathematical typesetting language TeX.”

Speaking as someone on the receiving end of T_EX files (in my day job I sometimes have to translate LAT_EX into a combination of T_EX and SGML), I have a few pointers of my own in addition to the advice given by Shallit, Stacey, and their commenters:

• BibT_EX does not work by magic. It doesn't get the bibliographic data from thin air but from .bib files. If use BibT_EX to produce a bibliography you must send the .bib files.
• LAT_EX can't read your mind. If you assign the same label to a subsubsection and a table, you might find that Table I has been cross referenced as Table 4.2.3.
• LAT_EX does not have precognitive abilities. If you put a \label command before the command that updates the counter it's supposed to be using, the label will pick up the last counter to be cross referenced instead. In particular, a \label command should not go before the caption of a figure or a table.