
LaTeX users are slower, make more mistakes, and are happier than Word users - ingve
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
======
to3m
Previously on HN, with the correct title:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)

~~~
ingve
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.)

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

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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.

~~~
dang
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.

------
j2kun
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.

~~~
qznc
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.

~~~
j2kun
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).

~~~
davidb_
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.

------
sbi
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.

------
LaurensBER
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.

~~~
qznc
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.

~~~
inclemnet
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.

------
sinkasapa
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.

------
alricb
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](http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/TOCSwitches.htm)

~~~
cnvogel
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.

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

------
timthelion
This is really like comparing a screwdriver to a
KUKA([http://www.kuka.com/](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.

------
Timmmmmm
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).

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

------
xname
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.

~~~
sinkasapa
Don't forget financial reasons.

~~~
xname
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.

------
ukblewis
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...

~~~
skierscott
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.

