
An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems in Academic Research - adulau
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
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dang
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=efficiency+comparison+document+pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=efficiency+comparison+document+preparation#!/story/forever/0/efficiency%20comparison%20document%20preparation)

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ajarmst
I only read the abstract, but it seems to imply that they believed that the
end result from using Word and the end result from using LaTeX were the same.
That is, they were two techniques to achieve the same goal. But LaTeX users
don't choose it because they think it makes them faster typists -- they use it
because they feel the end result is of objectively higher quality as a typeset
document. This may make the statement "you can do it faster in Word" moot or
inaccurate because "it" is something different.

~~~
voidpointer
However, by their measure, the results that were prepared in LaTeX were
inferior to the results created in in Word. Even for papers that were heavy on
equations. So while the LaTeX users would think they create a better end-
product, this isn't actually true under the quality metric used in the study.

I have created academic work both in LaTex and in Word and while I have not
measured it in an objective way I also had the feeling that LaTeX could create
better looking results once you've got over the first hump.

On the other hand, the integrated nature of a system like Word were
spellchecking, annotations etc. are all part of the main tool you work with
makes it very effective. It takes pretty long however to develop a workflow
that avoids all the pitfalls.

In a sense, LaTex makes you believe that once you got over the initial hump,
you have typesetting super powers but you will miss out on some of the
integrated UI stuff that may boost productivity. Word on the other hand makes
you believe that you already know everything while you still need to keep
fine-tuning your workflow until you don't mess up constantly.

~~~
ObviousScience
> However, by their measure, the results that were prepared in LaTeX were
> inferior to the results created in in Word.

They didn't measure the quality of the typesetting in any fashion, though,
which is what the GP's claim was about; they measured the rate of errors
typists made under time pressure.

It's also unclear what LaTeX software they used, since the one I use has
integrated spellcheck, etc.

~~~
voidpointer
> It's also unclear what LaTeX software they used, since the one I use has
> integrated spellcheck, etc.

That's a hugely important point and in a way it shows that they are comparing
apples and oranges. Word is a complete document editing system (well, more or
less) while LaTeX is a type setting systems and you need additional tools to
use it. Those tools can range from a simple plain-text editor (say, nano) to
totally integrated environments that are similar to word in their feature set.

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ajarmst
"For example, LaTeX users in our study attained better performance in the
typesetting of mathematical equations, and it is not surprising that LaTeX
users are typically in disciplines where mathematical formulas are frequent
(e.g., mathematics, engineering, or computer science)." I see. So, when you
get a better measurement for Word, it's because it's a better tool. When you
get a better measurement for LaTeX, it's because your user population is
different. I think we're done here.

~~~
josinalvo
I dont think that text means what you think it means =P

It is in a paragraph saying "different tools for different jobs"

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robinhoodexe
This study has been debunked previous here on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)

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

~~~
falcolas
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.

~~~
duaneb
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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cies
I agree that I'd be faster getting a small document done in Word than in
Latex.

But when the document gets huge: ToC, key phrase index, quotes half-way in the
margin, output to several paper sizes, multi-page tables, both footnotes AND
endnotes, source code listings, a large number of references to journals... In
that case I'm glad I used Latex for the smaller documents, because now I'm
acquainted to it in time for the big thing.

~~~
Osmium
I agree with you except for:

> multi-page tables

You won't be able to persuade me that's easier in LaTeX than Word! I say that
as an otherwise very proficient LaTeX user who finds himself much more
productive with LaTeX than Word.

As for this study, I imagine it's a question of proficiency–good LaTeX users
will be better with LaTeX, and good Word users will be better with Word. I
have colleagues who can only barely use LaTeX, so it takes them forever, and
they'd be much better off with Word. We do all our paper collaborations using
Word, for example (which drives me nuts but there we go).

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maxerickson
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)

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dgacmu
CS professor here - I use LaTeX, and my wife, also a professor in a different
field, uses word. From watching both of our workflows over quite a time, a few
things jump out very clearly:

1) LaTeX + revision control is better for multi-user concurrent collaboration.
Word + track changes can get the job done for one-person-at-a-time as might be
seen more often when making revisions. (We haven't compared word+revision
control). But the typical Word workflow involves emailing documents to
collaborators - barf.

2) LaTeX+bibtex is better for references. As far as I've been able to tell,
EndNote is a steaming pile of pain that crashes frequently and takes Word for
the Mac out with it. And glitches in horrible ways.

3) Word users are more likely to get their table formatting the way they want
it in less time. I hate playing that game in LaTeX. Particularly if you want
fancy nested stuff that looks right, is space-efficient, etc.

The study linked in this article notably omitted two of those that are quite
important at least in engineering disciplines -- multi-author collaborations
are the norm.

But the recommendations are asinine. In the engineering and sciences, at
least, the amount of time that goes into the physical preparation of the
paper, seated at your computer, writing de novo text, is _nothing_. It's
trivial. You could crank out a full-length CS paper (12 pages, 2 column, 10
point text) in a few hours, were you just limited by your typing speed and the
time taken to format it. If that were the case, I'd have more papers than
Erdos!

~~~
w1ntermute
> and takes Word for the Mac out with it

This is another important point.There are incompatibilities between the
Windows and Mac versions of Office. I've never seen any such cross-platform
issues with LaTeX.

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billsix
I've never seen effective version control of Word documents, but plain text
formats such as LaTeX work as expected with git/mercurial/subversion. Very
important for works with multiple authors.

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ObviousScience
There are two major faults in this study:

1\. They compare only "errors", but don't have any measure of overall document
quality. It's certainly the case that it's easier to make mistakes in LaTeX,
but I find that people who use LaTeX tend to end up with more professional
documents.

2\. They compare only on very short documents using very little time. In much
the same way anything I'm going to type in 20-30 seconds is better served by
Notepad than Word (mostly because Word isn't always even usable in that time
window), they're failing to compare LaTeX to Word in the situations where I'd
argue that the distinction matters - namely, large, complex document writing.
Things with >40 hours of work involved, >100 numbered items, >50 internal
references, etc.

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daly
Three major points were missed.

First, TeX is archival. I can still tex documents from my work in the 80s and
get the same results. My MSWord files won't load. Thus, MSWord documents die.

Second, TeX allows Literate Programs. I can write a trivial program to extract
my source code from TeX documents that explain the code. MSWord documents are
opaque. Thus, MSWord limits what you can do with the sources.

Third, TeX is a language. I can (and do) write style files containing macros
for my markup styles. In MSWord, what you see is all you are ever going to
get. Thus, MSWord is fine if you can't program.

None of these features were mentioned. All of them are important, at least to
me. I care that my work survives (archival), that my code can be explained
(literate programming), and that I can optimize my workflow (style files).

If these additional constraints were added to the study then I think you'd
find that some tasks are impossible in MSWord.

That said, this is a "bikeshed" paper. Emacs vs VI. Noise. Worse, it suffers
from "hasty generalization". Sigh.

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wtbob
Already discussed, and issues with the article itself are identified in
[http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication-
rev...](http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication-review-of-
the-plos-one-paper-comparing-ms-word-and-latex-how-not-to-compare-document-
preparation)

~~~
fluidcruft
FYI, the criticisms there are actually trivially handled by using the MathType
and Endnote packages.

The biggest challenge is I work in a field where Word dominates and
collaborators don't do LaTeX and journals won't accept it. So, there is very
little payoff for slogging over the LaTeX hill, unfortunately. The LaTeX to
Word translators all blow and Track Changes rules the world for collaborative
writing.

There is no workflow that is not a pain in the ass to collaboratively write
LaTeX with someone that can't use LaTeX or that sucks at LaTeX.

~~~
jjgreen
This is so true, I've tried Word/LaTeX collaboration twice, each time I spend
more time cleaning up the conversion mess than writing the sodding paper;
learn from my fail.

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jwl
Did they take into account something like version control? Because, I have a
hard time seeing using Word on a collaborative paper - or even just as the
single writer - being very effective in terms of version control.

~~~
Fomite
This is something of a double-edged sword. Writing in LaTeX requires all the
collaborators to be familiar with it - nearly everyone is familiar enough with
Word to make that work, but as multidisciplinary papers become more common,
the same is not necessarily true for LaTeX.

I encountered this when working with a group of both applied math people and
clinicians - the applied math people all wanted to use LaTeX, but the gains
just weren't worth the learning curve for the clinical co-authors.

~~~
duaneb
Surely google docs is better for collaboration than word is, though, unless
you're doing _serious_ math typesetting.

~~~
Fomite
Google Docs is decent, though I do usually have a fair amount of math
typesetting, but one of the key issues with Google Docs is you have to trust
everyone doing the writing to not change the tone of the piece, etc. It's less
conducive to the "Single Approving Authority" model that I've found useful in
some recent papers I've written.

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kh_hk
I don't think time spent and performance are good metrics on the quality of
the result, not meaning the output look but the quality of the work itself.
Anyone that has spent some time on SQA knows that.

For the study they used a predefined text, so there's no real way to measure
if there's an inherent quality on documents created using LaTeX, or if LaTeX
does something to your brain to conceptualize your ideas while you are
punching them on the keyboard. Or not.

    
    
        > Given these numbers it remains an open question to determine the amount of
        > taxpayer money that is spent worldwide for researchers to use LaTeX over a
        > more efficient document preparation system, which would free up their time to
        > advance their respective field. [...] We therefore suggest that leading
        > scientific journals should consider accepting submissions in LaTeX only if
        > this is justified by the level of mathematics presented in the paper. In all
        > other cases, we think that scholarly journals should request authors to
        > submit their documents in Word or PDF format.
    

This just sounds hasty. LaTeX may not be the tool for everybody and should not
be enforced. Neither MS Word.

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jeremysmyth
Well this is disappointing.

I wonder if they extended the study to include Markdown would that tilt the
balance somewhat. The overhead associated with LaTeX might come from the fact
that there's a compile cycle to get the formatting right, although they
mention Kile as an editor so that's not clear.

Markdown also has fewer features---therefore a smaller learning curve than
LaTeX)---and as a frequent user of Word (and lowriter), I know I interact
directly with fewer features of the wysiwyg editors, given that many features
are implicit or default, whereas I must manually invoke all features that I
use in a LaTeX document (those I haven't placed in a .sty file anyway).

~~~
klancaster
I use markdown (in Scrivener) for my academic writing, and include raw LaTeX
as needed for equations. I used Word in my masters' thesis many years ago and
will never go that route again - too many issues with Word being "smart" with
bullets, etc.

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Ar-Curunir
Editor of choice makes a big difference.

I can write LaTeX in Vim much faster than I can edit text anywhere else. Plus
I have automatic refresh on saving and rudimentary spell check in Vim. Why
would I use Word?

EDIT: Plus I have autocomplete set up that makes life even easier.

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Ar-Curunir
Reddit discussion:

[https://pay.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/2qz6ju/postpublicati...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/2qz6ju/postpublication_review_of_the_plos_one_paper/)

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debacle
This has been my experience. Watched a junior dev spend 3 months of 60 hour
weeks trying to create a "documentation" platform in LaTeX for what amounted
to very basic algorithms.

LaTeX is a good tool, but people who use it tend to abuse it. If you need
LaTeX for your solution, there's really nothing better for the job, but you
rarely need LaTeX for your solution.

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phreeza
I think LyX kind of hits the sweet spot between WYSIWYG editing, which helps
immensely with tables and free text, and the power of LaTeX for equations.

One thing I never understood is why it has its own file format and doesn't
operate on plain latex files. That makes interoperability with latex and in
particular colaboration with non-latex users harder.

~~~
jdpage
It's because LyX is a structured document editor, and its format is strictly
simpler than the full power of TeX. (La)TeX isn't actually that structured,
and with the ability to do weird stuff with macros, it becomes impossible to
convert losslessly from TeX to any more structured format (e.g. docx;
something like ps or pdf is less structured).

In other words, it can't operate on plain LaTeX files because someone not
using LyX might edit the files in such a way that LyX can no longer handle
them. By using their own format, while they don't prevent someone from editing
the file without LyX, they can at least guarantee that a valid LyX file will
always be loadable by LyX.

~~~
phreeza
The weird thing is, LyX can in fact import LaTeX files, and dump any
unrecognized command into a red box. If it were just possible to use the
imported latex file, and keeping latex as the default format while avoid
reformatting the entire file upon re-exporting it to latex, that would make
the interoperation possible.

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Menge
Interesting. My first experience in undergrad with LaTeX, I submitted the
paper over 3 weeks late with a grade per week penalty and got a B+. I never
asked the teacher about my impossible grade, but I would assume I had one of
the best papers in the class; usually I'm not good at structuring papers.

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ajarmst
Relevant rebuttal: [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/)

~~~
ajarmst
And another: [http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication-
rev...](http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication-review-of-
the-plos-one-paper-comparing-ms-word-and-latex-how-not-to-compare-document-
preparation)

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iseewhatdidt
I think that there is more fundamental cause for this correlation. See
reference [https://mjambon.github.io/vim-vs-
emacs/](https://mjambon.github.io/vim-vs-emacs/)

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josinalvo
surprising amount of conclusion from a small amount of fact.

I am not even sure time writing is worth optimizing in the first place.

BUT the evidence in increased errors and time lost might mean that the
cognitive load of writing latex is higher, and that might be really relevant

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guardian5x
I wonder which version of Word the study used. I couldn't find anything about
that.

~~~
cefstat
The following appears verbatim in the "Supporting Material":

> The study was conducted when most of the participants in the Word groups
> used Word Version 12. Only 3 participants used older versions of Microsoft
> Word. Newer Versions of Word include a new Equation editor that makes the
> software even more powerful and easier to use.

The authors of the article are, obviously, completely unbiased.

~~~
dubya
I think one big plus for LaTeX is its slowly changing nature. Word was
appalling 15-20 years ago for writing technical papers. If you gave up then
and learned TeX/LaTeX, you're most likely over the learning hump by now and
have just needed to learn the occasional new package.

~~~
Fomite
On the other hand, with Word's vastly improved equation-handling capabilities,
if you haven't gotten over the learning hump yet, there's a diminishing return
for doing so.

I have, for example, never really felt the need, and learning LaTeX has always
been binned for "It'll be slightly more of a hassle in Word, but it'll still
be done today."

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cjoelrun
Org mode to LaTeX conversion makes the production much less time consuming.

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plg
and I may suffer a loss of efficiency (time & effort, online-driving-
difficulty, problem solving, required training) driving my standard
transmission sports sedan compared to if I were to drive an automatic
transmission minivan

guess what though

I prefer the sports car

