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This study has been debunked previous here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002

Most of the study is, to be honest, bullshit.

Hmm. It seems that most of the arguments against the study were for the limited time allowed, and for the act of "reproducing" a target document.

IMHO, those are honest goals for a test. Your target may be your university's (publisher's, peer's) expected format which will cause a drop in your grade (pay, funding) if you miss. I also feel that we are frequently time constrained when trying to get work done, so I don't feel that the criticism against that is legitimate.

Now then, this is certainly not the definitive study to decide which is better, Word or LaTEx, but it's certainly an important study for those who want to be productive and have a particular format for a document that they need to match.

Much of the beauty of latex is the fact that you don't have to 'aim' at a target document, because it's already easy to get a decent looking paper together with about ten minutes of copy/paste formatting. You don't HAVE to worry about it because it's already producing a good document! Granted, you CAN make arbitrary layouts with latex, but the beauty is in the macro system removing the need to think about the layout.

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