Comment by davidovitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidovitch | Hacker News Reader

This is quite interesting, and given my experience with LaTeX (I am a post-doc and prefer working with LaTeX), I often wonder if it is all worth the trouble. Although I have only used Word (and LibreOffice Writer, odd the article doesn't even mention it) sporadically over the last years (and only for simple documents), I do wonder how Word and friends perform in settings that were not part of the experiment that is reported here:

* Large documents (50+ pages) (I remember having to deal with file corruptions, figures appearing at random places, formatting suddenly has a free will, ...)

* Lots of figures that get updated during the writing process

* Collaborating: merging several documents into one big report, especially if other authors do not follow formatting guidelines etc.

* Citations and references

* The authors mention it in the conclusions, but I think the test should also have included a scenario based on using templates instead of building something from scratch.

Other aspects why I prefer LaTeX:

* Version control with plain text files is rather convenient. And so is collaborating.

* Comparing different versions of the same document(s) is much easier with plain text (diff), although you can do something similar with PDF's

* I agree to a certain extent with the authors that scientific content is more important than the form, but I do prefer a traditional LaTeX look over Word documents. By far.

* I always use templates, and this speeds up the writing process significantly. Ideally, you can forgot about the formatting in those cases.

I think the authors make a good point though. Maybe we should invest in smarter/better/more productive LaTeX editors?

edit: formatting, added citations point...

i used word for a large project (undergrad project report of 100+ pages with 4 member team) in 1997 and even then word had features for most (if not all) of the items in your list:

* large docs can be handled by splitting them into master-child documents. You can format across all child documents from the master.

* figures can be edited in-place or embedded from original source.

* collaboration was possible then with child and shared docs, it should only be better now.

* citations and refs are supported, although I dont know if all styles of citations are.

* templates have been in word from a long time and imo are quite natural because they're prototype-based (ie, you can make any document AFTER you create it into a template. other documents that use that as a template inherit all styles and so forth)

* the visual "View changes"mode in word is quite natural and even allows for some offline discourse with your collaborators as each user's comments and changes are marked with a different color and comments are allowed.

*words symbol editor (which also existed pre-1997) is quite up to the task of most equations (again, imo; i've not done a lot of hairy equations)

word is just a better tool for large documents, and i say this asn ardent anti-ide guy. my preferred setup for code documentation is sublime text and markdown; but when you want to Just write a document, word it is.

Citations and refs are good until someone tries to copy paste them between documents. This wouldn't work in latex either but the visual temptation to do so with word is much easier to fall into, what is worse is that after pasting the ref looks OK but once you try to update reference numbers your copied references will get broken.

Track changes is the pest and its use has actually been banned at all companies I worked for. It only works when you want to show the most recent changes but it actually breaks standard document comparison which means you can no longer compare version 1 with version 3 of a document. I won't even comment on how horrendous the diff view in word is, even on a qhd display the 4 small panes you get are so confusing that I'd rather diff it manually with 2 documents open aide by side.

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