Word or LaTeX typesetting: which one is more productive?
mappingignorance.org
mappingignorance.org
(My take on the short version: Of course it's very difficult to use LaTeX to reproduce a document's specific formatting. That's not what LaTeX is for. On the other hand, if you want to type a bunch of text with semantic labels (title, section, subsection, etc.) and use a journal-provided style file to format that text in precisely that journal's style, LaTeX is really, really easy.)
Note that this is also really, really easy in Word.
(In fact, I'm curious to know: do most folks using Word these days actually use the semantic elements like "title" and "heading 2"? Or is it still common for people to just hit "bold" and enlarge the font size?)
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Math typesetting has been possible since 2007 in an integrated form (whereas the old formula editor was just an embedded OLE object, which you couldn't style, and which often didn't match the surrounding text in size and font). The syntax is similar to LaTeX, although (in my opinion) easier and faster to type because of a few syntactic niceties (see UTN #28).
And if you wanted automatic ToC generation your option has always (back at least several versions and two or three decades) been to use the proper styles Heading 1–9. Generally, if you want to keep your sanity you should be using styles everywhere and always. I don't use physical formatting at all. The benefits of that are the same as in LaTeX: You can change styles at will without going through all of your document and it's far easier to achieve a consistent look of the document.
But yes, every now and then I see people who approach »I want to make this a heading« as »I need to make this bold and larger«. I'm not sure how they are thinking (especially since Word since 2007 made styles much more prominent than the physical formatting), but there are such people. LaTeX's advantage here is that it needs education to use at all, which means that's the point where one can basically say »There are no ways of making things bold, only ways of emphasising more, which may be rendered as bold«. Word can and will be used without training and the results are exactly what you'd expect in that case.
Essentially, the test is too limited for its purposes.
A huge advantage for LaTeX is the ability to copy and paste faithfully and modify easily. This is how novices learn. In Word, if you look at an example of something awesome, it tells you nothing on how to make it. With TeX, it is self-documenting on how to produce it and how to modify it.
Also, text tools can help greatly. One can easily integrate data sources piping text into these documents, handling tabular issues.
But the key is maintenance. If you need to make major changes, text documents are much easier to manage. TeX is used for documents that someone cares about, not some one-off letter to be written and forgotten. Though I would still prefer to use TeX even in that case, but I concede that that's just me.
I would like to propose a similar test, much more relevant to what scientists do in their jobs, where LaTeX would win hands down: Your paper was rejected from Journal A. You now want to submit it to Journal B. Your task is to convert the manuscript ao that it fits the Instructions for Authors for Journal B.
I have switched to using HTML/CSS for creating my docs. It works !. It took a while to set it up but I love using it. If similar effort was put into making HTML useable for academic work, we would have been in travelling in interstellar space ! Anyway use the tool that your heart wants.
PS : The writer of Games of Thrones uses terminals from the 1960s ! So I don't think these questions matter.
It would be cool if you shared your system - does it produce print quality?
It renders client side and its pretty fast.
The only problem is matrix notation and latex macros.
I been trying in my free time playing with parsers like peg.js to find a way to create a robust system. but My knowledge in parsers is limited as an engineering student.
Here is a project that I created. I feel reluctant to share my real name but since you think it might be useful.
George RR Martin uses DOS based word processor from the 80s, not...60s...wordstar.
Also GoTs is years behind its schedule, but I wouldn't hold that up as evidence of anything.
I have printed my docs and there seems to be no difference between them that I can notice with my naked eyes.
The thing is, book publishers have people who will re-typeset a manuscript. Especially if written by a best selling author whose next books will sell in the millions.
By comparison, the academic press shifts most of that work on the authors. Academic authors don't get paid to write content and sometimes have to pay, don't get paid for typesetting, don't get paid for peer reviews, etc. (And Elsevier, one of the big academic presses, had a profit margin of 36% in 2010.)
If your heart wants to get published in an academic journal, then you may end up using a different tool than if your heart wants to publish on the web, or wants to publish a best-selling novel. By analogy, if my heart is set on doing Python programming, I won't be doing much microcontroller work. If my heart is set on optimizing the performance of dense linear solvers, then I likely won't do it in Python.
I completely agree with the current top comment; this study is much too limited to be of any use in real life.
How should it be done?
Writers from academia are effectively forced to use LaTeX. Writers who just start writing will use Word, because that's what's on Windows machines, and that's what they immediately have to hand. Besides, why should they know of the existence of other options?
They don't. Word will remain "popular" because even though everyone I know who uses it "in anger" hates it, nevertheless, people don't know of any effective alternatives. Those who use LaTeX will continue to revel in the power of it, and shrug about how many people are hamstrung by Word.
I, for one, would love to see a genuine and informative comparison. This paper is the closest I've seen, and while many people sneer at it, no real alternatives have been offered.
LaTeX makes me feel like I'm in control of my document. I've had word processors do really weird things that I could never explain. In LaTeX, I can always get an explanation.
Thanks to programs like LyX, http://www.lyx.org/, one can have the power of both understanding the underlying and the high level startup speed of WYSIWYG{M}, and one doesn't need to make a billion trips to TeX StackExchange.
If you need a quick throwaway document that doesn't need to be maintained, and you don't care if it looks professionally typeset, Word is ideal, just type (although arguably LyX offers the same).
If you need a document that will receive a lot of scrutiny, and you're going to maintain it again and again (like a resume, CV, business card (yeah, I did it), academic paper, etc...) you should go with LaTeX. Get the look right, and don't worry about it any more.
We use HTML for web, which is very public and maintained. We need a markup language for printed text that has the same expectations. LaTeX is that.
With LaTeX I find I make a lot less accidental mistakes. If something goes wrong, I know exactly what caused it (just look at my changes!)
One of the benefits of LaTeX is that it practically forces you to do this.
Edit: Somehow I missed your second sentence, and so we are in agreement. LaTeX is better in this regard, because it forces good practice on the user.
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{letter} \signature{the user} \address{the user\\right here} \begin{letter}{Receiver\\somewhere over the rainbow} Bla bla bla ...
Not very different and you can ensure your letters look great.
My main gripe with latex is debugging. Writing in a latex will go all fast and productive, until I forget something trivial that ends up taking an hour to find because of cryptic error message during compile.
Last, I think it was a & symbol in text that I forgot to escape. Tex was throwing an error about unmatched {, with a line number way later than my ampersand. Gah, went crazy looking at my file in vim and being certain everything was matched.
It doesn't happen to me as much anymore, I've added a few vim plugins that help a lot (like rainbow parenthesis).
(Note: I'm one of the co-founders of Overleaf, so any feedback is appreciated, thanks. My co-founder has also put together this free introductory course for anyone that's looking to give LaTeX a try: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/learn/free-online-introductio...)
Has anyone used texmaker [1]? It looks like it would be good for beginners to the language, though clunky?
For beginners or people who don't know / don't want to learn Latex, it's great. It's a bit more clunky if you're more of a latex "power-user" and want to customise stuff, but still possible, though a regular latex editor might be a better choice in that case.
Well, I learnt a lot about LaTeX while using it for writing my undergradute thesis.
As much I admire LaTeX for its power/customizability, for typical non-tech/business docs I prefer Lyx nowadays. Feels like using MS Word, but powered by LaTeX :p
For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) gives good results for very little effort.
For most things, I use Org-Mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org/), which is an absolute joy to use. It outputs via Latex, and if you want a bit of extra customization you can include Latex statements verbatim. Org-Mode also works as a literate programming environment if you want to include and run bits of code, include parts of other files, or if you want to generate charts or diagrams.
Edit: I should also mention that org-mode has a great table editor.
https://www.authorea.com/ (though this is not strictly LaTeX)
Automatic figure placement sounds good in theory, but in practice you have to manually fix everything up.
pdflatex && pdflatex && bibtex && pdflatex
Slow buildspeed
Writes a lot to stdout every time you invoke it. Most of it completely irrelevant.
When encountering error, waits for input. Neither ctrl-c nor ctrl-d will immediately kill it.
One newline does nothing, two makes new paragraph.
\textit \textbf \mathit \mathbf \emph \it \bf. Bold+italic works in normal mode but not in math mode.
Subfigures. Why? subfigure is deprecated. caption doesn't work with beamer. subfig doesnt work with hyperref. "It's true that subfig doesn't cooperate well with hyperref, but when the alternative is no subfloats at all …" http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/144782/subfigure-and-...
Why is this a problem? Many people advocate starting each sentence on a new line, so that diffs between versions of a document are more intelligible - they'll show you just the sentences that have changed, rather than whole paragraphs.
latexmk. It doesn't fix the slow build speed, but at least it figures out the correct number of rebuilds. It also has a mode that rebuilds as soon as an input file changes (using inotify et al).
For web development, HTML, CSS, Javascript can be written directly, or generated by some other template language like haml, slim, coffeescript, sass, stylus, etc.
I believe the same applies to TeX. Although AFAIK there aren't template languages targeting TeX, treating TeX as "dynamic HTML" or just use your favorite language to generate TeX sometimes turns out to be much cleaner and more maintainable code. The generated TeX is not human-read friendly, but just works.
Example: "In all other cases, we think that scholarly journals should request authors to submit their documents in Word or PDF format. We believe that this would be a good policy for two reasons. First, we think that the appearance of the text is secondary to the scientific merit of an article and its impact to the field. And, second, preventing researchers from producing documents in LaTeX would save time and money to maximize the benefit of research and development for both the research team and the public."
I am honestly not sure how they think accepting papers in PDF format would prevent researchers "from producing documents in LaTeX". Do they really not know that not only can you generate PDF from LaTeX, but that that is what is commonly being done?
Second, do they really not understand that there are options other than Word or LaTeX? I know of quite a few people who use Pandoc (Markdown + some inline LaTeX for when you need equations/references) [1]. Others use a non-Word word processor (e.g. because they're running on Linux). Others again use LyX. This casts doubt upon their ability to make policy recommendations when their understanding of the available toolset is incomplete.
Third, the study seems to be awfully limited. In at least my field (computer science) tables and figures are often automatically generated from the data using scripts so as to avoid errors transcribing the data manually, so I personally don't really care how easy it is to type in a table by hand. How about long documents (e.g. a journal paper) broken down into multiple files? How do the various approaches compare for that? What about version control and collaboration mechanisms; e.g. how do the mechanisms for merging divergent document versions in Word compare with text files in LaTeX/etc. plus your off-the-shelf VCS of choice? Managing references? (I honestly don't know the answers to most of these questions, but I think they are important for a qualitative comparison.)
Fourth, drawing sweeping conclusions about public spending on research from such limited study that doesn't even account for half the stuff that's going on in writing a typical research paper (multi-author collaborations, researching and citing references, generation of tables and figures from data) is kinda ... out there.
Fifth, while you generally don't have to worry about researchers being able to afford a nice Windows or Mac system with MS Office and Endnote, the same may not hold for students. Especially when your research needs require decent POSIX-ish capabilities, in practice this means OS X or Linux. Plenty of students in engineering fields do run Linux by preference, and can run Word only via a dual-boot setup or virtual hosting. Forcing them to switch to Word would be counterproductive.
[1] See, for example, Kieran Healy's write-up here: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/