
Word or LaTeX typesetting: which one is more productive? - ColinWright
http://mappingignorance.org/2015/04/06/word-or-latex-typesetting-which-one-is-more-productive-finally-scientifically-assessed/
======
Steuard
Previous discussion of the original source of this comparison:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)

(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.)

~~~
to3m
So good, they discussed it twice:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497)

~~~
maxerickson
Another:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8886114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8886114)

------
jostylr
This in the comments of the page is a good response:
[http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2015/01/14/knauff-and-
nejasmi...](http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2015/01/14/knauff-and-nejasmic-
recommend-banning-latex/)

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.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Not only is the test limited, it is entirely irrelevant. A major advantage of
(La)TeX is that the journal has a good LaTeX template in its Instructions for
Authors, and you almost don't have to think about formatting. Certainly not
about formatting references. These guys come across as high school students
criticising Apple for having a flawed product design approach. The fact that
they've never heard of version control systems says it all.

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.

------
1971genocide
I hate latex - I am not sure how much I will be down-voted on the internet but
in the academic world saying those words will you give you cold harsh looks.

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.

~~~
tomjen3
LaTeX has a bunch of benefits to it, one of those is its output quality. I
don't how your system can equal that unless you are going to write your own
render system.

Also GoTs is years behind its schedule, but I wouldn't hold that up as
evidence of anything.

~~~
1971genocide
I just save the webpage as .pdf and have a seperate stylesheet for printing.

I have printed my docs and there seems to be no difference between them that I
can notice with my naked eyes.

------
eykanal
What about bookmarks? Styles? Table of contents? Bibliographies? Proper
hyphenation? Adding images? Adding captions to images? Multiple columns?
Almost all academic papers have at least some of the above in them, why ignore
them?

I completely agree with the current top comment; this study is much too
limited to be of any use in real life.

~~~
ColinWright
How would you suggest an objective comparison should be done? People who are
familiar with one are unlikely to be equally familiar with the other to be
able to compare the packages rather than comparing their own skills, and
anyone unfamiliar with the packages will not progress far enough to test the
features you mention.

How should it be done?

~~~
izacus
Maybe the fact that skill at using each package outweighs the differences is a
conclusion on itself.

~~~
ColinWright
I don't see how, perhaps you could explain further. Both packages are
powerful, both packages have many features, both packages require time to
acquire fluency and productiveness. Experience suggests that people will pick
one and stick with it, making it impossible to measure the difference in
productivity.

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.

------
aaronchall
Being a programmer, and having used both, neither exclusively, I think I offer
an unbiased viewpoint.

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/](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.

------
virulent
Maybe I use Word wrong, but I always hated how it was really easy to screw up
formatting and spacing by accident. As well, changing some line spacing
consistently across the document was a pain (e.g. list spacing).

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!)

~~~
tomjen3
You are using Word wrong (like everybody else). Don't manually change the font
sizes on anything, instead give the text the correct style (title, subtitle,
paragraph, etc) and then change that style to be what you want.

One of the benefits of LaTeX is that it practically forces you to do this.

~~~
MereInterest
When the easy way to do something is the wrong way to do it, it indicates a
problem in the tool itself.

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.

~~~
blumkvist
What if the user wants to write a letter?

~~~
tomjen3
I fail to see the problem:

\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.

------
auxym
I like latex and use it almost exclusively for non-collaborative stuff. I've
grown to despise word, although it _is_ easy to make the argument that it's
quicker for throwing up a short document.

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.

~~~
gh02t
Yeah, I rather love LaTeX too, but debugging is probably its biggest weakness.
Especially the types of errors where the error message indicates an error in a
line _after_ where the error actually is, because of how the parser works.
Those take me forever to find.

It doesn't happen to me as much anymore, I've added a few vim plugins that
help a lot (like rainbow parenthesis).

~~~
pvaldes
You can use lacheck for this. Is also integrated in auctex (for emacs) as
'Check' entry on the menu Command.

------
JohnHammersley
It's also a lot easier to get started with LaTeX than it used to be -- e.g.
with cloud-based compilers such as Overleaf
([https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com)) which remove the need
to get everything installed and working locally before you can try it out.

(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...](https://www.overleaf.com/latex/learn/free-online-introduction-
to-latex-part-1))

~~~
tomjen3
That was never really an issue - grab the tex distribution for your platform,
install and done.

------
ComputerGuru
So it's 2015 and obviously LaTeX is still as relevant as it ever was - but is
there a better, nicer way for someone to make an introduce into the world of
LaTeX?

Has anyone used texmaker [1]? It looks like it would be good for beginners to
the language, though clunky?

[1]:
[http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/texmakertop_big.png](http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/texmakertop_big.png)

~~~
hakanito
I started out with LyX, but as soon you need to do something out of the
ordinary it becomes difficult, and you have no idea why things behave the way
they do. So I'd rather shave off that experience and start dig in to LaTeX.
Can't recommend [http://www.sharelatex.com](http://www.sharelatex.com) enough,
it's great. Start with the simplest template and go from there.

~~~
anta40
+1 for Lyx

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

------
im3w1l
I've been forced to use latex (academia), and I don't really like it. A few
reasons:

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-...](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/144782/subfigure-and-subfig-
packages-deprecated)

~~~
jamessb
_One newline does nothing, two makes new paragraph._

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.

------
b6fan
I sometimes find LaTeX too verbose. And sometimes it's very tricky to do
seemingly trivial things.

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.

------
Fice
Also there is LyX ([http://www.lyx.org/](http://www.lyx.org/)), which tries to
combine the advantages of both worlds.

------
rbehrends
I have to say, the underlying paper scares me a bit. It seems to be pretty
heavy on research politics, driven by a very limited study, and the authors do
not even seem to grasp the mechanics that underlie the generation of computer
documents very well.

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/](http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/)

