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Comment by madcaptenor | Hacker News Reader

But is this paper written in faKe LaTeX?

I assume it is, because the author writes "As a non-LaTeX user", but I'm having trouble verifying this by eye otherwise. Which I suppose is the point.

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Oh yes, it is. My teeth hurt while reading it. There is much, much more to TeX typesetting than just the Computer Modern fonts (which many find unattractive, by the way).

One of the benefits of LaTeX is supposed to be easy switching between fonts.

I don't think I've ever seen something in LateX that didn't use Computer Modern!

Maybe you just didn't know it was LaTeX if it wasn't Computer Modern? I typeset my thesis using Minion and Optima.

Yes, there are two big giveaways in the article. The first is how the word LaTeX is typeset. This has a command that produces a much fancier typesetting in most LaTeX documents. The second big giveaway is a bit deeper into the paper

> It turns out there is an alternative that satisfies my economist mindset—FaKe LaTeX documents created in Microsoft Word. That is exactly how I produced this note.

There's also the awful justification throughout.

Well he did cite a study showing that people were more productive using Word than LaTeX. That's a very good justification assuming it's factually accurate and the productivity gap is meaningful.

Most of his complaints about how hard it is to use LaTeX seem absurd, but that doesn't mean he isn't experiencing them or that they aren't common among less technical users.

Sorry, I meant justification as in the typesetting sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Justifie...

This is something TeX is _very_ good at. Word, less so.

Ah, I think he mentioned that as one of the things Word can't mimic.

Would LaTex hyphenate “Mi- crosoft”. It struck me as particularly ugly.

There was a time in my life when I would have noticed that, but I haven't actually written LaTeX in years.

I can tell instantly from the poor spacing of the justified text. Word makes obviously poor choices that TeX would not. Word could use the same algorithm used by TeX. I have read that the codebase for Word includes a significant amount of legacy code attempting to maintain backward compatibility, so they are probably stuck with the layout code currently used.

On that note, I wasn't aware you could get Computer Modern as a font in Word (having tried once!).

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