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Comment by sien | Hacker News Reader

There is a paper "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" that is will worth a look.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Big quote from the abstract :

"On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users."

However, it is worth noting that anyone who has ever dealt with a Word document that is a collation from other people usually winds up with similar to hassles to what the writer finds in the article.

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This paper has been criticized in many places, because the way it's set up of course Word will win. People had to do things like very specific figure placement that is difficult in LaTeX.

But in reality, most people just accept how LaTeX handles the figure placement by default (which is usually quite good), and doesn't waste time fighting it. So it's not really a real-life comparison of the two.

If the challenge had been "Write a document formatted according to the norms of your field", which is what people are actually doing most of the time, LaTeX would win easily. For scientific papers the journal is going to redo all the formatting anyway (using their own custom LaTeX set-ups), so there's no reason to waste time on this.

Indeed, one look at the comments would unveil a whole lot of shortcomings to their methodology. One of which was an entirely opaque way in which they defined 'errors in typesetting'.

> But in reality, most people just accept how LaTeX handles the figure placement by default (which is usually quite good), and doesn't waste time fighting it.

In my experience, LaTeX's default figure placement is actually quite bad, and you have to spend some time trying to paste it in different places to get it to place the figure in the place you want it.

An interesting article. I'll offer my counterpoint is the fungiblity of a LaTeX document. It is at the end of the day an opens source text based standard. That means I can easily put it in git, I can easily modify it in my favorite text editor (doom emacs) that I've already configured for my personal workflow. It means the document is light, and it means that I don't have to worry about everyone I send it to having the right software.

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