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Comment by ajarmst | Hacker News Reader

I only read the abstract, but it seems to imply that they believed that the end result from using Word and the end result from using LaTeX were the same. That is, they were two techniques to achieve the same goal. But LaTeX users don't choose it because they think it makes them faster typists -- they use it because they feel the end result is of objectively higher quality as a typeset document. This may make the statement "you can do it faster in Word" moot or inaccurate because "it" is something different.

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However, by their measure, the results that were prepared in LaTeX were inferior to the results created in in Word. Even for papers that were heavy on equations. So while the LaTeX users would think they create a better end-product, this isn't actually true under the quality metric used in the study.

I have created academic work both in LaTex and in Word and while I have not measured it in an objective way I also had the feeling that LaTeX could create better looking results once you've got over the first hump.

On the other hand, the integrated nature of a system like Word were spellchecking, annotations etc. are all part of the main tool you work with makes it very effective. It takes pretty long however to develop a workflow that avoids all the pitfalls.

In a sense, LaTex makes you believe that once you got over the initial hump, you have typesetting super powers but you will miss out on some of the integrated UI stuff that may boost productivity. Word on the other hand makes you believe that you already know everything while you still need to keep fine-tuning your workflow until you don't mess up constantly.

> However, by their measure, the results that were prepared in LaTeX were inferior to the results created in in Word.

They didn't measure the quality of the typesetting in any fashion, though, which is what the GP's claim was about; they measured the rate of errors typists made under time pressure.

It's also unclear what LaTeX software they used, since the one I use has integrated spellcheck, etc.

> It's also unclear what LaTeX software they used, since the one I use has integrated spellcheck, etc.

That's a hugely important point and in a way it shows that they are comparing apples and oranges. Word is a complete document editing system (well, more or less) while LaTeX is a type setting systems and you need additional tools to use it. Those tools can range from a simple plain-text editor (say, nano) to totally integrated environments that are similar to word in their feature set.

In my experience creating a high-quality end result requires knowing about typography, whether you use LaTeX or Word. Things like improperly typeset ”quotes”, or typesetting functions like sin, cos, etc. as variables in math mode, are mistakes that arise because people don't know what they're doing. And that's true regardless of the tool.

Exactly! A fun anecdote on this: four professors from my alma mater wrote a book on computation physics in LaTeX, the deal with the editor was that since they were taking care of typesetting and graphics they would be paid both as authors and as typesetters.

As it turns out since the authors' fee was per-copy, while the typesetters' fee was a one shot deal, they made much more as typesetters (though this situation might get reversed if the book keeps selling for decades…).

Journals typically do the final typesetting though, so it seems like a premature and irrelevant optimization. Although, I do see the point for preprint.

My experience with LaTeX is that it enables and encourages my OCD behavior and it is very easy to be sucked into an enormous game of package dependency hell and whack-a-mole to achieve some desired aesthetic result. Whereas with Word I already expect an inferior result so I'm somehow more easily happy getting 95% of the way there and calling it a day. It's not too hard to learn "what not to do" in Word and how to use counters and references. Certainly if you've got the capacity to learn LaTeX, you can learn how to markup Word properly and use styles etc.

Another important point is that I doubt that the LaTeX users were permitted to use personal libraries of macros and styles. Typing a manuscript in raw LaTeX is simply something most LaTeX users never do---I have a directory of style files containing macros for tasks I frequently do. For example, if I type "\rights" into one of my documents, it inserts a nicely formatted copyright notice, boxed and aligned with the Creative Commons symbol. It would take me a half-hour to recreate that in raw LaTeX. Such libraries of personal macros (or organizational ones - when I wrote my thesis, I used a style file from my University that made formatting overhead essentially nil) are the default behaviour for regular LaTeX users, which is not true of Word users. So, again, I think they're measuring the wrong thing because the LaTeX users are not doing their task the way a typical user would, but the Word users are.

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