Stefan Kottwitz wrote:Knowing all stuff is not so important. A key is, to know where to look for (documentation), work with source code of packages, just try fixing things. There are good ways to know, such as why and how to build a minimal working example - once one understood that, he easily tracks down problems and either fixes them himself with the hacked-down code piece, or post the small code sample to a LaTeX forum such as here. Once a problem can be reproduced and tested, it's usually easy to fix for very experienced people, even without knowing details before.
Experience comes over time. You can simply ask about any LaTeX problem here, that's the purpose of the forum. Once we talked about it and posted a fix, other people have a good chance to find it via google. So, asking questions helps other people too. Reading answers then also adds knowledge over time. Often solutions are quick hacks that show how to manually fix things.