FAQ: Getting Help#
How do I animate X? Why do I get error Y? Can someone help me?#
Before asking the community, please make sure that the issue you are having is not already discussed in our FAQ section sufficiently well so that you can resolve the problem yourself. You can also try to use your favorite search engine, if you are lucky you might find a blog post, a question on StackOverflow, or a post in the r/manim subreddit.
If this is not the case, please take a moment to properly prepare your question: the better you manage to explain what exactly it is you are struggling with, the more efficient people will be able to help you. Regardless of the platform you choose in the next step, StackOverflow has a good guide on asking good questions.
As soon as you have a good idea of what exactly you want to ask, pick one of the following communication channels:
The community is most active in our Discord server. Click the link to join, then pick one of the
#manim-helpchannels in the sidebar, and post your question there. If you are comfortable with using Discord, try to search for your problem using the search function of our server; perhaps people have been talking about it before!We are also monitoring questions on StackOverflow that are tagged with
manim.Many people are also active in our r/manim subreddit, feel free to post there if you are an avid Redditor – but be aware that Discord or StackOverflow might be better choices.
And finally, you can also start a new discussion on GitHub if you dislike all other options.
In all of these channels, please make sure to abide by Manim’s Code of Conduct – in short, be excellent to one another: be friendly and patient, considerate, and respectful.
What should I do if nobody answers my question?#
Try and see whether your question can be improved: did you include all relevant information (in case of errors: the full stack trace, the code that you were rendering, and the command you used to run Manim?). In case you used a very long example, is it possible to construct a more minimal version that has the same (faulty) behavior?
If you posted in one of our help channels on Discord and your question got buried,
you are allowed to ping the @Manim Helper role to bring it to the attention of
the volunteers who are willing to take a look. Please refrain from pinging the role
immediately when asking your question for the first time, this is considered impolite.
You can also try to post your question to a different channel if you feel that you are not having any success with your initial choice – but please do not spam your question in all of our communication channels (and in particular for Discord: please don’t use multiple help channels at once).
In the end, it is as for most open-source projects: our community members are volunteers. If you do not receive a quick answer to your question, it may be because nobody knows the answer, or because your question is not clear enough, or it could be that everyone who can help you with your problem is busy doing other things.
The library does not behave as documented, or something broke in a new release. What should I do?#
Sounds like you have found a bug. One of the best ways of contributing to the development of Manim is by reporting it!
Check our list of known issues and feature requests in our GitHub repository. If the problem you have found is not listed there yet (use the search function; also check whether there is a corresponding closed issue, it is possible that your problem has already been resolved and will be fixed with the next release), please consider the following steps to submit a new issue.
Note
If you are unsure whether or not you should file a new issue for some odd behavior
that you found, feel free to ask the community developers, preferably in one of
our #manim-dev channels in our Discord.
Make sure you are running the latest released version of Manim, your problem might otherwise already be fixed in a more recent version. Check the Changelog for a full list of changes between Manim releases.
Choose the correct category for your report when creating a new issue. We have dedicated issue templates for bug reports, feature requests, and installation issues. If your report falls into one of these categories, read the issue template carefully! Instructions are given in the
<!-- ... -->sections of the text field. If you want to suggest a new feature without concrete implementation details, see the instructions given in this answer.For bug reports: prepare a minimal example that can be used to illustrate the issue. Examples with hundreds of lines are very inefficient and tedious to debug. Your problem needs to be reproducible for others, so please make sure to prepare a suitable example.
This is mentioned in the bug report template as well, but it is very important: if you report that some code raises an error, make sure to include the full terminal output, from the command you used to run the library up to and including the last line with the error message. Read carefully: if the message mentions that there is another relevant log file, include this other file as well!