Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rygian | Hacker News Reader

Scientific literature seems to disagree with this statement: "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" [1]

For example, amount of written text was higher among Word novices than among LaTeX experts, with overall less mistakes. The only category where LaTeX users produced more content than Word users was equation text, and even in that case, authors suggest that the difference in productivity between Word experts and LaTeX experts does not differ significantly.

Disclaimer: I like LaTeX a lot.

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

View on HN

Granted it was 3 decades ago, but when I was in grad school, choosing to use LaTeX seemed to add a few months of effort to the "writing" stage of a thesis. However, it was hard to assign root cause because LaTeX and Word were producing different things. The best technology allowed you to create more, but at a price. Typeset dissertations were beautiful, mine was not.

What LaTeX allowed you to do, in principle, was to "build" your document, i.e., type a single command and have camera ready output roll out of the laser printer. Using Word (or even more primitive tools -- I was on a MS-DOS machine), always required some manual intervention. My workflow involved scissors, glue, scotch tape, and a copy machine. But I got done very quickly once I was ready to start writing.

LaTeX has the massive (!!1) advantage of being trivial to put into version control.

I wonder how they incorporated that into their productivity metrics

As an aside, I have used a workflow where I give someone a a paper to review as an overleaf project, they make all their changes, and then I merge it back into my work picking and choosing the bits I want. And this all works fairly nicely since overleaf has support for git.

There are a lot of problems with that article. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002 for a discussion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com