
Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems – LaTeX and Word - thesumofall
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0115069
======
dkbrk
I question the validity of their methodology.

At no point in the paper is exactly what is meant by a "formatting error" or a
"typesetting error" defined. From what I gather, the participants in the study
were required to _reproduce_ the formatting and layout of the sample text. In
theory, a LaTeX file should strictly be a semantic representation of the
content of the document; while TeX may have been a raw typesetting language,
this is most definitely _not_ the intended use case of LaTeX and is overall a
very poor test of its relative advantages and capabilities.

The separation of the semantic definition of the content from the rendering of
the document is, in my opinion, the most important feature of LaTeX. Like CSS,
this allows the actual formatting to be abstracted away, allowing plain
(marked-up) content to be written without worrying about typesetting.

Word has some similar capabilities with styles, and can be used in a similar
manner, though few Word users actually use the software properly. This may
sound like a relatively insignificant point, but in practice, almost every
Word document I have seen has some form of inconsistent formatting. If Word
disallowed local formatting changes (including things such as relative spacing
of nested bullet points), forcing all formatting changes to be done in
document-global styles, it would be a far better typesetting system. Also, the
users would be _very_ unhappy.

Yes, LaTeX can undeniably be a pain in the arse, especially when it comes to
trying to get figures in the right place; however the combination of a simple,
semantic plain-text representation with a flexible and professional
typesetting and rendering engine are undeniable and completely unaddressed by
this study.

~~~
sramsay
_At no point in the paper is exactly what is meant by a "formatting error" or
a "typesetting error" defined._

No, and they clearly don't mean it in any way that a designer would find
intelligible. Let's compare the two in terms of things like kerning,
hyphenation, text figures, ligatures . . .

[http://www.zinktypografie.nl/latex.php?lang=en](http://www.zinktypografie.nl/latex.php?lang=en)

In some sense, it's not even a fair comparison. TeX is a typesetting system,
which Word makes no claim to be. You can do some primitive "formatting" in
Word, but you can't layout a book or an article to the standards required by
contemporary book/journal design.

I have lots of books on my shelf that were designed using either TeX or LaTeX
(though InDesign is far more common). I have exactly none that were designed
using Word.

~~~
wodenokoto
> Word, but you can't layout a book or an article to the standards required by
> contemporary book/journal design.

Of course you can. Plenty of books are done in Word and many papers and
conferences release word templates for paper submissions.

~~~
jamessb
Many books are indeed initially written and edited using Word, but aren't they
generally passed on to someone who does the final layout in
InDesign/QuarkXpress before printing?

In contrast, authors using LaTeX often produce camera-ready copy themselves.

------
davidovitch
This is quite interesting, and given my experience with LaTeX (I am a post-doc
and prefer working with LaTeX), I often wonder if it is all worth the trouble.
Although I have only used Word (and LibreOffice Writer, odd the article
doesn't even mention it) sporadically over the last years (and only for simple
documents), I do wonder how Word and friends perform in settings that were not
part of the experiment that is reported here:

* Large documents (50+ pages) (I remember having to deal with file corruptions, figures appearing at random places, formatting suddenly has a free will, ...)

* Lots of figures that get updated during the writing process

* Collaborating: merging several documents into one big report, especially if other authors do not follow formatting guidelines etc.

* Citations and references

* The authors mention it in the conclusions, but I think the test should also have included a scenario based on using templates instead of building something from scratch.

Other aspects why I prefer LaTeX:

* Version control with plain text files is rather convenient. And so is collaborating.

* Comparing different versions of the same document(s) is much easier with plain text (diff), although you can do something similar with PDF's

* I agree to a certain extent with the authors that scientific content is more important than the form, but I do prefer a traditional LaTeX look over Word documents. By far.

* I always use templates, and this speeds up the writing process significantly. Ideally, you can forgot about the formatting in those cases.

I think the authors make a good point though. Maybe we should invest in
smarter/better/more productive LaTeX editors?

edit: formatting, added citations point...

~~~
vinodkd
i used word for a large project (undergrad project report of 100+ pages with 4
member team) in 1997 and even then word had features for most (if not all) of
the items in your list:

* large docs can be handled by splitting them into master-child documents. You can format across all child documents from the master.

* figures can be edited in-place or embedded from original source.

* collaboration was possible then with child and shared docs, it should only be better now.

* citations and refs are supported, although I dont know if all styles of citations are.

* templates have been in word from a long time and imo are quite natural because they're prototype-based (ie, you can make any document AFTER you create it into a template. other documents that use that as a template inherit all styles and so forth)

* the visual "View changes"mode in word is quite natural and even allows for some offline discourse with your collaborators as each user's comments and changes are marked with a different color and comments are allowed.

*words symbol editor (which also existed pre-1997) is quite up to the task of most equations (again, imo; i've not done a lot of hairy equations)

word is just a better tool for large documents, and i say this asn ardent
anti-ide guy. my preferred setup for code documentation is sublime text and
markdown; but when you want to Just write a document, word it is.

~~~
Too
Citations and refs are good until someone tries to copy paste them between
documents. This wouldn't work in latex either but the visual temptation to do
so with word is much easier to fall into, what is worse is that after pasting
the ref looks OK but once you try to update reference numbers your copied
references will get broken.

Track changes is the pest and its use has actually been banned at all
companies I worked for. It only works when you want to show the most recent
changes but it actually breaks standard document comparison which means you
can no longer compare version 1 with version 3 of a document. I won't even
comment on how horrendous the diff view in word is, even on a qhd display the
4 small panes you get are so confusing that I'd rather diff it manually with 2
documents open aide by side.

------
userbinator
_The participants were instructed to reproduce the source text within thirty
minutes._

Given such a visual task, it's no wonder a WYSIWYG editor like Word would make
it much easier to get things looking exactly as they were instructed to. In
other words, many of the LaTeX users probably spent a lot of time trying to
"reverse-engineer" the formatting, something that very _very_ rarely occurs in
practice.

~~~
sytelus
Exactly. If you ask a Word user to reproduce any of research papers in pdf
format, they might end up spending days without success. Getting pretty 2
column layouts, properly aligned headers, spacing, figure numbering etc that
doesn't look like a letter from your bank is very hard, if not impossible.
Exactly reproducing Word like document in TeX would be similarly hard because
you might also have to reproduce all the alignment oddities and layout
uglyness.

------
botman
As a long-time LaTeX user, I'm a little disappointed to read these results,
but I fully believe them. I've spent countless hours fighting against the
layout algorithm to get images to go in the right place, among other
frustrating issues.

Efficiency aside, using LaTeX is expected in fields like physics and math, and
if you write your paper in Word, readers will be biased against it
(consciously or subconsciously). On the ArXiv, the vast majority of papers are
typeset using LaTeX, and of the non-LaTeX papers, a large fraction of them are
low-quality or written by cranks, hence the negative association.

~~~
_delirium
> if you write your paper in Word, readers will be biased against it
> (consciously or subconsciously)

I've found that happens mainly with papers that are not only in Word but
formatted a bit weirdly. Those can be avoided by people who use Word
regularly, though, and in that case you usually have to look pretty closely to
tell if something was done in LateX or Word, if they both use the same
template (e.g. the Word vs. LaTeX versions of the ACM paper template).

Telltale "Wordisms" that I run across fairly often, and probably do have a
negative reaction to: 1) large spaces due to justification in two-column
formats without hyphenation (solution: turn on auto-hyphenation); 2) a
paragraph being in a totally different font or font size from those around it
(solution: paste without formatting); and 3) PDF title set to something like
Paper.docx (solution: set a title when exporting to PDF).

------
huahaiy
The point of LaTeX is to not worry about format, just the content.
"Reproducing a document" is rarely done by normal LaTeX users. Most people
just use a template that is appropriate for the task, and let the algorithm
taking care of the format.

Basically, the study set up a straw man to attack, and it doesn't not have any
ecological validity.

------
sbi
Looking over their data, it seems that they coded incomplete text as an error.
So, for example, participants 34 and 37 completed none of the table exercise
and were coded as having produced 513 errors (both were LaTeX users). This
accounts for the vast majority of the variation in the observed errors. I
think they've convincingly shown that Word is more productive than LaTeX for
some of the study tasks, but not that the resulting output is more correct.

That being said, I don't doubt that LaTeX is harder to use and more error
prone than Word. Since I find myself frequently writing mathematics-heavy
text, I personally prefer LaTeX ...

------
username223
It's strange they didn't show side-by-side comparisons of the resulting PDFs.
Do Word and (La)TeX produce equally pleasant results? Last I checked, Word-
papers looked pretty amateur.

Also, it came across as two people with an axe to grind. For example, are the
LaTeX people using editors with automatic spell checking or correction? Which
system was used to come up with the examples? Which system did the person
creating the examples normally use?

------
jamessb
Almost all scientific papers have more than one author, so collaboration and
version control features are also important, but were not considered in this
study. (For example, since .tex files are plain text they can be conveniently
managed with git)

Also, if the intent is to determine which system should be used to "save time
and money", the cost of licensing proprietary software must also be
considered.

~~~
_delirium
Although I mainly use LaTeX and prefer its semantic markup, the revision
control is one thing I do prefer about Word, at least for my workflow. There
are cases where I could imagine the git tooling/workflow being superior, but
for me personally it hasn't worked well. Whereas Word's "track changes" mode
works well for me as a way of suggesting, commenting on, and integrating
revisions (replacing a lot of email traffic).

~~~
peawee
Agreed! "Track Changes" and master-child documents made it really easy for me
to work on 50+ page documents with more than just another collaborator.

Personally, after doing several large documents in LaTeX and only then trying
Word, I'd go with Word most times.

------
thesumofall
What's still missing in the LaTeX ecosystem (to my knowledge) is a visually
pleasing writing environment. The end result might look great but code editors
are simply not made for prose. Even editors specifically designed for LaTex do
not invite to write - they invite to code.

Until then I stick to my iA Writer --> Markdown --> pandoc--> Word workflow

~~~
coolestuk
Actually, there are a variety of LaTex editors which I think must meet most
people's standards. When I decided to write a book last year, I couldn't face
doing it in Word (or anything which would not allow me to view the formatting
codes). I was spoiled for choice when it came to LaTex editors. I settled for
TexMaker, and within 6 months I had produced a 500 page book, complete with
tables, charts and several thousand footnotes.

I'd never used LaTex before in my life. But I wanted the book output as PDF
and it was important that the book looked professionally produced. I was
really quite happy with the results. Before biting the bullet and using LaTex
itself, I had looked at pandoc and other technologies which could output to
PDF (e.g. python's ReST). But after some initial tests, I realised they were
quite limited in their ability to output a complex PDF document.

TexMaker allows one to have the LaTex source and the PDF end result open in
adjacent windows. MikTex/TexWorks was another editor which functioned in a
similar fashion. With TexMaker I could jump from a line in the PDF to the
originating line in the LaTex file (and vice versa). One can go to
images.google.com and search for screenshots of LaTex editors to see the
variety available.

The only major enhancement I would like, is if the LaTex editor would allow
one to hide all the LaTex codes (perhaps colour-coding the text in the editor
to indicate that a paragraph section contains hidden formatting codes). I do
find the Latex markup distracting as I try to read the text. However, being
able to read the PDF output and then jump to the LaTex source does mitigate
this to some extent (I have a large monitor which permits me to have 2 A4
document windows open side by side).

~~~
thesumofall
That's exactly what I'm talking about: Distracting formatting codes, too wide
text width (by default), mono-spaced fonts (by default), ... Yes all of this
can be dealt with but it would still be great to see a LaTeX editor that
assumes writers and not coders as its user.

------
dmix
One important point of software that is forever sidelined is that the
emotional experience is equally as important as the usability side.

Was this properly weighted?

The abstract does mention this with a single line:

> however, more often report enjoying using their respective software.

Whereas the results involving usability/functional output accounted for about
90% of the text summary.

~~~
canjobear
They attribute the increased emotional satisfaction of LaTeX users to
cognitive dissonance. Page 12:

"A striking result of our study is that LaTeX users are highly satisfied with
their system despite reduced usability and productivity. From a psychological
perspective, this finding may be related to motivational factors, i.e., the
driving forces that compel or reinforce individuals to act in a certain way to
achieve a desired goal. A vital motivational factor is the tendency to reduce
cognitive dissonance. According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, each
individual has a motivational drive to seek consonance between their beliefs
and their actual actions. If a belief set does not concur with the
individual’s actual behavior, then it is usually easier to change the belief
rather than the behavior [6]. The results from many psychological studies in
which people have been asked to choose between one of two items (e.g.,
products, objects, gifts, etc.) and then asked to rate the desirability,
value, attractiveness, or usefulness of their choice, report that participants
often reduce unpleasant feelings of cognitive dissonance by rationalizing the
chosen alternative as more desirable than the unchosen alternative [6, 7].
This bias is usually unconscious and becomes stronger as the effort to reject
the chosen alternative increases, which is similar in nature to the case of
learning and using LaTeX."

~~~
andreasvc
I find that conclusion gratuitous. It's much more likely that there are
legitimate reasons underlying the satisfaction which they didn't consider.

Ironically, the authors' move to rationalize away this unexpected finding as
cognitive dissonance could itself be characterized as an instance of cognitive
dissonance. The authors probably started out with a particular belief, and the
findings didn't agree; instead of accommodating the data, they attempt to
neutralize it.

------
ademarre
So their conclusion is that LaTeX is best saved for documents with much
mathematical content. But it's also worth considering that LaTeX workflows
offer better compatibility with revision control systems. The change tracking
features in MS Word have never impressed me the few times I've worked with
them.

------
to3m
Fascinating! I wonder if these findings scale to larger documents. As a novice
user (both self-professed, and by the standards of the report) of both
packages I've long found that Word becomes rather inconvenient once you pass a
certain number of pages. Its internal structure is rather opaque, so sometimes
when formatting goes awry it turns out to be quite difficult to fix. And it
won't put non-text items in sensible places itself, though of course if you
don't mind carefully positioning each one by hand then you can do that.

I actually much preferred using latex, even though it was so comically
horrible in many respects (my Makefile had to run pdflatex 3 times, for
example, and needed a whole other step to pre-convert PNGs into PDFs
beforehand). More upfront investment, but less ongoing bother.

Or cognitive dissonance, perhaps that was it?

~~~
JBiserkov
When formatting goes awry, press Shift+F1 to open the 'Reveal Formatting'
pane.

~~~
to3m
That just shows you the properties though, doesn't it? My usual problem is
that the style properties seem OK, but the styles themselves are being applied
to the wrong bits of text. Then when I try to fix it by removing the unwanted
style from the incorrectly-styled portion, the section that _was_ OK loses its
style too! It's as if word's internal record of where each block of formatting
begins and ends has got out of whack somehow, and when called upon to change a
part of one styled section ends up changing the whole thing. (Or perhaps my
mental model is wrong? But most of the tine, this sort of thing does work...)

This doesn't have to happen that many times to become really annoying...

~~~
dankohn1
It was critical for my mental model to note that Word applies styles to the
trailing carriage return.

------
teleclimber
The paper does not mention Word Perfect, which some people seem to prefer in
some cases. I'm not a user (or affiliated in any way) but I was researching
document editors for a project when I found this epic comparison of Word vs
WordPerfect in real world use:

[http://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/showthread.php?22433-Word-
Vs.-W...](http://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/showthread.php?22433-Word-
Vs.-WordPerfect&s=)

~~~
coolestuk
25 years ago, I was a secretary. I used WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Word,
DisplayWrite and other WP programs. Microsoft Word was just about the worst of
the bunch. If it hadn't been for Microsoft's criminal monopolistic practices
(OS + office suite), Word would never have become the de facto word processor
in the world.

Even 15 years ago I was working as a systems administrator in a company which
still insisted on using WordPerfect because of its superiority. A Microsoft
fanboy became the IT Director, and WP was phased out for Word.

------
nico_h
Read the article quickly and they mention that they actually tested LaTeX with
the editor used by the participants (not just LaTeX), but they don't mention
if they used the orthographic and grammar correction in the editors. I know
the one provided by Word is excellent, so if the other editors' are not as
good, that might explain some of the difference in textual errors.

------
dantheman
This is my experience with LaTeX, it's very powerful but I spend more time
thinking about formatting in it than I do in Word.

------
swehner
Try using Word with a makefile. I published a book using Latex with a makefile
/ scripts. When the printer came back and said two pages were off (wanted
colour pages at the centre of the book), a simple update did the trick. Copy-
and-paste with Word? No thanks.

------
taspeotis
I don't understand LaTeX or TeX or their relationship or how to use them. I
tried to. I'm on Windows, so latex-project.org suggests [1] I download
proTeXt.

The proTeXt website [2] tells me that "the self-extracting protext.exe file
... is well over 1GB". In fact it is 1.7GB.

Considering Office 2013 Professional Plus x64 clocks in at under 1GB I rofl'd
my way out of there straight back to Word. And Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and
OneNote.

[1] [http://latex-project.org/ftp.html](http://latex-project.org/ftp.html)

[2] [http://www.tug.org/protext/](http://www.tug.org/protext/)

~~~
chj
Most of the size come from optional packages. There are lean and mean
distributions under 15MB of download.

~~~
pja
And most of that is documentation of the optional packages IIRC.

------
Htsthbjig
" _The participants were instructed to reproduce the source text within thirty
minutes. "_

As a Latex user I would never use it for writing a 30 minutes text. I will use
LibreOffice for that.

If the source text is made in Word of course it is going to have errors,
defining error as "a different outcome that original word document text
generates".

We DO use Latex for writing 300+ pages books, and Latex is great for it:

-It is not proprietary.

-Very easy to program and use different UI programs to modify the same document. We write using mostly voice, we edit it visually.

-Very easy to interface with our own software, for example for creating automatic graphs from sensors.

------
orbitingpluto
Efficiency in LaTeX vs Word always depends on what you are doing. At one job I
was using bash, Powershell, pdftk and LaTeX to extract data from PDFs, VLookup
using Powershell, and then annotate the PDF with the result using LaTeX
transparencies (remember to run twice). Really simple stuff. It was a shit
task to do before it was scripted with LaTeX. (five hours of mind numbing work
vs 15 minutes of run time, plus it gave me a window of time for a coffee run).
Use the right tool for the job, which in my case, turned out to be a Rube-
Goldberg machine.

------
storrgie
no. I like being able to manage the data as text readable. I like fine control
over my formatting... and I especially like not being tied into a clunky 'ide'
to manage the document.

~~~
Sorgam
How is being tied to a clunky text editor different from being tied to a
clunky GUI? No matter which alternative text editor you use, apparently it's
still clunky (slow) according to that somewhat limited research.

~~~
Retra
Text editors are clunky? If a text editor is 'clunky', it is almost assuredly
not clunky in the same sense as an IDE.

------
zzleeper
Alternative:

Write it in markdown/commonmark (possibly with an extension for tables a la
knitr).

Pick your favorite text editor and just type away merrily. Use latex
($\gamma$) when you want formulas.

Then compile it to PDF with pandoc (which will deal with the intermediate
latex step). Then, resist the urge to endlessly play with the formatting and
just work on the simple markdown text.

~~~
jumpwah
Does pandoc support commonmark?

~~~
walrus
I don't think it currently does, but it almost certainly will in the future.
The primary author of Pandoc is the primary author of CommonMark.

~~~
jumpwah
Yes, I've been wanting to ask John for quite a while now about it, just always
kept forgetting. The reason I doubted is because there's already pandoc-
markdown...

Has he stated anything about the future between pandoc and commonmark? I
imagine support for commonmark is likely, but is pandoc-flavoured markdown
then doomed?

(I don't know how similar commonmark is to pandoc-markdown, but when I checked
out commonmark at an early stage, it did handle lists differently, so I have
reason to believe there would be more differences. [But I actually prefer how
commonmark handles lists though.])

------
emgee1
What i miss in the discussion is that using latex you concentrate on the
content and not on the formatting. If you are looking for good layex editors
there is one that outshines them all : emacs.

~~~
canjobear
Yes, that's the theory, but in practice I find that I spend much more time
futzing with the formatting in LaTeX than in Word, especially in two-column
mode with figures. The article and various comments here suggest I'm not alone
in this...

I'd love to have a system that actually delivers on the latex philosophy of
separating content from formatting.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I find in Word I don't try too hard on formatting, especially in 2 column
situations, because it is just going to look ugly no matter what I do. Using
latex, in contrast, I really focus on aesthetics, which means some more time
spent for decent results.

------
tuinslangboogie
Why in a world, a person that is going to write an academic paper with charts,
tables, graphs and stuff would choose LaTex? What is the point of comparing
them? Even LaTeX says that it is not a word processor. Do not compare damnt.

Quote from LaTeX website: "LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX
encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their
documents but to concentrate on getting the right content."

If you are going to write a philosophical article or a big novel, choose
LaTeX, if you want to draw charts and graphs choose Word. Cristal clear.

~~~
qznc
If you _draw_ graphs/charts, then use a WYSIWYG program like Word. If you
_generate_ graphs/charts from data, then use a compiler like TeX, which nicely
integrates into a build process.

------
chj
word is easier to get started, however, as the document grows, you will miss
latex badly. image and table positioning are equally annoying if not worse
than latex.

