LaTeX users are slower, make more mistakes, and are happier than Word users | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX users are slower, make more mistakes, and are happier than Word users

plosone.org

28 pointsingve32 comments

Previously on HN, with the correct title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002

Gah! I really wish the HN submission feature could borrow some ideas from Stack Overflow's duplicate question detection.

(FWIW, the full title is "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development", which is too long for HN, so the previous submission also changed it.)

We're planning to work on better duplicate detection in the new year.

I like how it works now organically. If the discussion was broadly seen, there won't be any up vote interest, and if not, then it clearly hasn't taken its course.

We like that too, and it's by design. A story that hasn't been broadly seen won't count as a duplicate in the new system either.

It is fascinating that the discussion here seems to go into very different directions, though. A lot less "study made this and that mistake" comments here.

I cannot seem to find anywhere in the paper that describes whether the mistakes were counted during or after the participant claimed to be finished. If it's the latter, then it could easily be attributed to the lack of a live preview and spell-checking, which is a technological problem easily fixed.

Moreover, the study only uses extremely small documents (with only a few mathematical equations) in their study. The power in TeX comes from defining project-wide macros and label management, allowing for instantaneous refactoring, tidy management of multiple versions of a document using imports and versioning, and seamless integration with whatever terminal tools you already use.

In other words, this paper's implied conclusions are short-sighted because TeX does much more than print the written word (or mathematical/tabular data). I would like to see the same study extended; make the same groups refactor a twenty page document, replacing one notation with another, reorganizing the sections, adding new figures, and reformatting the bibliography according to a different standard.

Yes, collaboration and maintenance is another plus for TeX, which was not considered in this study.

However, spell/grammar checking and the longer edit-compile-review cycle (e.g. when coding TikZ pictures) is still an issue for me where Word probably has an advantage.

Any tool suggestions for grammar checking LaTeX documents? I use vim's spell checking, which is ok, but a tool which understands grammar could be better than a simple dictionary lookup.

Though it's a totally unreasonable workaround, I usually draft my TikZ diagrams in an online editor like WriteLaTeX, and copy-paste the finished diagrams into my documents. I'd like to have auto-refreshing documents offline, but I haven't found a tool that works with my environment (vim with a simple build script).

latexmk + your document viewer of choice (evince for me) will rebuild your document every time you save. Evince will automatically reload the new document. I use it with vim.

I do my diagrams outside of LaTeX, or at least separately. I don't see an advantage of having them done with the text given that the typesetting of a fixed rect is trivial.

The data from the study are available on the PLoS website. The authors coded incomplete documents as mistakes---some participants submitted empty LaTeX documents for the table exercise with hundreds of "mistakes." Since the LaTeX users mean percentage completion was lower than that of the Word users, this may explain part of the authors' finding that the LaTeX users were more error prone as well.

LaTeX is incredible slow at first but the true power comes from only having to do something once and being able to put it under version control.

I spent an afternoon getting a presentation template ready, now it's incredible easy to make a powerful, beautiful presentation ready. I tried to do the same thing with Powerpoint and apart from the frustration I always lost a lot of time when I (or Powerpoint) managed to screw up something.

It does in general lead to some embarrassing moments when working with non academics/developers. Somewhere there is a team of artists that still jokes about that developer guy that proposed to do his presentation in Latex.

As someone just learning to really use the power of LaTeX, I wish I could find more templates like these to customize for myself!

Do you already know https://www.overleaf.com formerly writelatex.com ? It has some nice templates.

This is brilliant, thanks for the suggestion!

I use LaTeX a lot and nearly exclusively, however for presentations I try to use HTML. I rarely get to do it, because work usually requires me to use certain templates.

Handwritten HTML is just as nice to version control. I can embed rich media stuff easily. I can use transition and other effects (in the rare cases where they actually make sense). I can embed interactive things, which is better than alt-tabbing somewhere else. I can create a pdf as fallback as well.

Do you have an html framework or tool you recommend for this? I like LaTeX a lot for its stability and very reliable results, but I've more recently wanted easier embedding without sacrificing this, and hadn't thought of using html.

I think one fundamental flaw in this study is that Word is a text editor and LaTeX is a markup format. It is just strange to compare a markup format to an editor. For LaTeX they list that at least "TeXnicCenter, LaTeX Editor, Kile, or WinEdit" were used. Word has a lot of helpful features for writing English Word documents (might be less helpful with Quechua) but the helpfulness of the editor varies greatly in the LaTeX world. I mean, it is possible to produce LaTeX text files from Word and doing so is a great example of how the editor matters.

So this major confound may be why LaTeX users seem so error prone. Word is one of the best editors for English text but maybe WinEdit is not.

I hope this fails to influence journal publishers. It is garbage.

I often work with quite large Word documents, and they can become a real pain once you start using some features, like automated table of contents. In fact, if someone edits the document and messes up the formatting, you'll have to edit raw field codes, with are a bit LaTeX-like [1]

[1]: http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/TOCSwitches.htm

Oh, yes. My pain exactly. I think word is, given the huge functionality made very accessible to pretty much anyone who can point at things with the mouse, quite impressive software.

But let a few people edit a Word document in turn, on different computers, maybe with different versions of MS Office, even the simplest 1-page abstract will turn into a bizarre Frankenstein monster where changing one thing in one place, will suddenly create funny effects in other locations... (e.g. observed recently: identing bulletted lists will change the numbering of another, numbered list...) Don't get me started on footnotes changing pages, or jumping around of embedded pictures.

So, for anything requiring collaboration between several people (I have the feeling that editing a word file from different computers, probably by different versions of MS office makes these things occure more often) it's still a mess... and something where LaTeX shines.

Since they are measuring orthographical mistakes, did they control for spell-checker usage?

Which is why I use Lyx - best of both worlds. You get to use latex equations, the final document is pretty, and the document is readable while editing (i.e. not filled with commands and other crap).

Now I know what kind of research is left for the stupid guys.

Many Word-haters don't know how good Word is, simply because they are biased for "political/religious" reasons.

It is OK to be a LaTeX-lover and Word-nolover, but you don't have to be a Word-hater if you don't use Word.

Don't forget financial reasons.

I don't have money to buy a Porsche, but this never makes me a Porsche-hater...

I don't think financial reason alone makes you a hater of a product.

I hate the Word from ten-or-so years ago, when I used it. Allegedly newer versions are better. I like LaTeX because I know its quirks (e.g. placing floats). I don't know any Word/Powerpoint Guru, but my collegues are very good with LaTeX.

I admit that I have been a Word-hater and I stopped doing it, because I don't know the current Word. Guilty. I have to use the current Powerpoint now and then and hate it, but that might just be my ignorance.

This is really like comparing a screwdriver to a KUKA(http://www.kuka.com/). Given a random object, anyone will be able to screw more screws into it with a screw driver than with a KUKA... But given a large number of similar objects than the story is quite different.

This is utter bullshit. I can't write equations for my life in Word (mainly because I hate that utter piece of shit) but I can type equations and other content in LaTeX faster than I can write it by hand - admittedly I use LyX which has hints which helps a hell of a lot, but either way - I can still beat Word and by-hand with LaTeX...

You can't write equations in Word simply because you hate Word. - Doesn't this tell you anything?

For raw text, word and latex are equal (raw words, quotes, etc) latex and word are even in wpm. Certain areas of latex beat words in wpm (\ref, \cite) but there are many other areas where word wins.

Anything where you care about how the document loos takes time. Care about how the title page looks? Want to format the bibliography just right? These are issues all I, an intermediate user, have faced.

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