
The Case for Writing Papers in Economics Using FaKe LaTeX [pdf] - PascLeRasc
http://www.farmdoc.illinois.edu/irwin/research/The_Case_for_Fake_LaTeX_Body_Feb%202018.pdf
======
cup-of-tea
I don't understand why LaTeX is considered hard. I wish people would try TeX
out first as well. You literally type stuff and a paragraph comes out. Enter a
blank line to separate paragraphs. It can't be much easier. LaTeX just adds
some macros to make it easy to make a title and section headings etc. Once you
become proficient at entering equations in TeX it's incredibly fast. And you
won't even need to render them to read them after a while.

> One can achieve something like 95% of the visual appearance of native LaTeX
> documents with a one-time investment of an hour or less work

Yes, and one can use LaTeX and achieve 100% with a similar one-time
investment. I really don't understand this. To produce the document presented
here LaTeX has absolutely no extra overhead compared with any other tool.

I suspect the misconception comes from the complicated looking tools like
TeXnicCenter etc. If people saw me writing LaTeX in emacs (with zero buttons
or other complications) they wouldn't think it was complicated. It's just
text.

Still, if people insist on using Word for whatever reason I'm glad if they
make the documents look nice like this one, even if the page geometry is way
off (use Komascript).

~~~
cpach
_”I wish people would try TeX out first as well.”_

Do you by any chance have any TeX tutorials to recommend?

~~~
svat
My favourite TeX tutorial, which will turn you from beginner to expert and
make you fall in love with TeX (maybe), is the book _A Beginner 's Book of
TeX_ by Seroul and Levy. It comes highly recommended by Hans Hagen in the
ConTeXt manual. (It's not free—published by Springer—but you can find it in
the usual places you find books: libraries, whatever.)

------
vamin
Lots of comments pointing out how obvious it is that the paper was not typeset
with real LaTeX, but I think that's a little beside the point. Scott isn't
arguing that it looks 100% as good as LaTeX. The article cites research that
suggests that writing in LaTeX hurts productivity, even for expert users:

 _We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the
same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical,
grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users
performed even worse than novice Word users_

~~~
pseudonom-
I think that paper came up on HN before and IIRC the tasks they were measuring
were things like manually positioning some figure in an arbitrary position.
This is not a use case LaTeX optimizes for or one that comes up often in my
experience.

Edit: See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)
for an earlier discussion of the referenced paper.

------
_raoulcousins
LaTeX isn't that hard, Microsoft equation editor is slow, and don't even get
me started on how much more time consuming it is to put in references, tables
of content, etc.

The first equation in the paper is

$$\Delta P_t = \mu + \sum_{j=1}^J \lambda^j S^j_t + \sum_{p=1}^P \delta_p
\Delta P_{t-p} + \varepsilon_t$$

Yes, it's a bit of a mouthful but clicking all of those symbols in equation
editor is much slower once you know the syntax.

~~~
GrayShade
Pseudo-LaTeX syntax works in Word's new equation editor (introduced in Office
2007). I can't test, but I suspect your equation works as-is in Word.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
I can test for the class. It's close, the curly brackets aren't used for
grouping in MathType:

[https://i.imgur.com/T9JxuH5.png](https://i.imgur.com/T9JxuH5.png)

Fixing that for the summation terms and t-p subscript produces:

    
    
        \Delta P_t = \mu + \sum_(j=1)^J \lambda^j S^j_t + \sum_(p=1)^P \delta_p \Delta P_(t-p) + \varepsilon_t
    

[https://i.imgur.com/Imix6GU.png](https://i.imgur.com/Imix6GU.png)

where Word doesn't realize that the terms after the sum should be the content
of the sum. Word Help and the equation editor are thoroughly unhelpful in
deducing the appropriate syntax of \sum.

What I eventually divined was that the syntax is state-based: If you type it
out manually, it will put your cursor into the right position, and once you're
done with _t you need to hit the right arrow key before typing the space and
plus symbol. Copy-pasting the whole thing is different and does not work.

I mean, it's great that it supports an entry mode that's faster than digging
through menus and clicking on symbols with your mouse. But it's still
fundamentally different and, dare I say, inferior when the appearance of the
equation isn't defined by the sequence of characters you enter (or copy-paste)
but by the sequence of arrow keys and escape keys you hit while you type it
in. This is exactly the problem with Office vs. LaTeX.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
If you type a space after P_t it will figure out it's a subscript. That is,
after you copy-paste your text you can hit space a few times to wake it up to
the fact that it needs to render it.

------
ska
In my experience the abstract statement "The downside is that it is a very
time intensive and complicated method of writing papers. " is just incorrect.

There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you are past that it is much
_less_ time intensive that writing papers in a word processor. This effect is
magnified with longer documents.

That may be somewhat domain specific. And to be open about my biases, I also
think that Word's "track changes" is a pretty poor collaboration tool.

~~~
norswap
Hahahahaha

I might be going to downvote hell for this, but as a computer scientist
writing papers for a living, every hour spent writing latex belies your
comment.

By the way, Context is a much saner alternative, although it still shares many
of Latex' core flaws.

Unfortunately, that doesn't matter because most conference mandate use of
their Latex or (ugly) Word template, and using Word is cause for
ostracization.

You are also correct to say that version control is a big advantage of Latex.
I wonder why Microsoft hasn't come up with a better competing solution.

~~~
cup-of-tea
How many papers have you written? Have you written a master's or PhD thesis?
How exactly are you spending your hours writing LaTeX? It sounds like you are
doing it wrong.

~~~
norswap
You're two links away from the answer, person that obviously wants to have a
good faith conversation.

~~~
cup-of-tea
It took me a while to figure out what you meant. I've never looked at people's
profiles on here before. I couldn't imagine writing my thesis in anything but
LaTeX. Or rather, anything that didn't support both high-quality typesetting
and programming. I had little programs written in my .tex files which would
generate some of the tables and figures. TikZ is wonderful. I aimed for
nothing less than TAoCP level of quality.

~~~
norswap
The output of Tex is superior to anything else. I doesn't change the fact that
the user experience is awful.

But if you want Tex quality with less head-bashing, Context is much better
than Latex. It's what I use for my thesis, but not for my papers -- templates
are all Latex, and I didn't know about it at the time.

Also I disagree with your basic point: hours of my time are worth much more
than some fancy ligatures and fluff that makes the text look very marginally
better.

------
nextos
Why not using LyX? It writes LaTeX for you with minimal effort and knowledge.

This article screams non-LaTeX in the title already. The word LaTeX should be
rendered as [http://site.uit.no/futurelab/files/2013/10/latex-
logo.png](http://site.uit.no/futurelab/files/2013/10/latex-logo.png)

~~~
ascom
+1

I've found that writing in LyX is _faster_ than writing in Microsoft Word and
friends. It forces you to focus on content (hence the WYSIWYM) and greatly
accelerates equation entry with keyboard shortcuts and live preview.

------
slivym
I think the point I would make in favour of actually using LateX is that
whilst evidence may indicate Word is quicker, the time I spend in Latex is (as
a programmer) better spent.

I mean that in the sense that because the interface is basically a compiler
compiling my code I can logically reason about what it's doing, and have
reproducible results. I can tell it where I can tell it how to take care of
images and be confident it will follow my guidance. This is especially
important in larger documents. In Word, editted page 3 is as likely to change
the layout of page 72 as an edit on page 72 is, and an edit on page 3 will
have an equal chance of effecting the layout of page 4-N.

In Latex with very few exceptions I do not manually layout any part of the
document, I design the rules for how the document is laid out. Obviously that
is more time consuming - as solving the general problem is always more painful
than a point fix.

This really pays off when your dissertation is due in 2 days and you're trying
to cut 150 pages down to 100. You can focus on content, not why Bill Gates
personally believes that _any_ image is a graven image and is therefore
forbidden.

------
reacweb
"I conclude that appearance/aesthetics is the dominant reason for widespread
adoption of LaTeX". I fully disagree. IMHO, the dominant reason is that
Microsoft word has been a nighmare for scientific documents. The different
generations of equation editors were buggy and incompatible. You can not edit
an old document using a recent version of word. You can not exchange documents
with people using a different version of word. For most people, when you can
not use word, the only choice for scientific documents is LaTeX.

Even if recent versions of word are less buggy, people will migrate slowly.

------
xixi77
Link seems broken atm :(

Regarding the efficiency though, I would think (even disregarding new users of
LaTeX) it would really depend on the length and content of the paper.

For longer papers with many formulas I'd pick straight LaTeX any time. Beside
the formulas and look, this way once something looks good, it probably won't
break in many unforeseen ugly ways when stuff is changed or added elsewhere.
This in my experience is not the case with word processors, where you really
need to review the whole document after any edit. Plus, working with text in a
text editor is so much more efficient and enjoyable.

For things like slides and notes though, particularly when there are a lot of
screenshots/graphics/tables/etc. in proportion to text, it's somewhere about
50/50 between Word and org-mode, which I then compile into pdf through either
LaTeX or html. But I have accumulated a lot of templates and customization for
the latter option to work well; without them, I would just be using Word.

Another factor is whether, and how often, it is going to be necessary to
update the document with changed figures/tables/etc. This depends on how they
are generated: if they come from an Excel spreadsheet, things work much
smoother embedding them in Word; if they are generated by some code running,
it's much easier to have the LaTeX document pick them up.

------
superdaniel
If the person already knows markdown, Pandoc is a great option [0]. I find it
really useful for creating pdfs. I haven't used it to create official
documents that often, but I have used it to create Beamer slides and it was a
very smooth experience. If you're an advanced user and you want to do
something LaTeX-specific you can just write LaTeX inline and Pandoc will
accept it.

[0] [http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)

------
n4r9
The referenced article concerning the speed of Latex vs Word can be read
freely online [0].

I remember reading that article shortly after it was published. They conducted
an experiment in which participants were instructed to typeset a piece of work
from scratch in thirty minutes in either Latex or Word. Since Latex is most
valuable and efficient when writing a large document such as a book,
containing multiple chapters, citations, cross-references and potentially
images, the study is almost meaningless. The only conclusion I would draw from
it is "if you want to type something small up real quick, maybe consider
something other than Latex".

[0]
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069)

------
Yetanfou
If this PDF is supposed to convince me that this 'fake' LaTeX is somehow able
to produce results which come close to the real thing it fails rather
miserably. Yes, it is set in some variation of Computer Modern [1] and the
basic layout sorta-kinda looks like that produced by commonly used LaTeX
templates. That said, the PDF distinctly looks like something produced by MS
Word due to its rather characteristic (problems with) spacing and kerning. It
also does not look the results produced by the AEA template [2] but that might
be by choice.

Writing the same document using something like LyX is probably easier than
using "FaKe LaTeX" with the added advantage of using LaTeX templates to
provide a uniform look. The only real advantage of this "FaKe LaTeX" is the
possibility to directly use a spread sheet program for tabular data.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern)

[2]
[https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/policies/templates](https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/policies/templates)

------
faizshah
Tangentially related: I recently learned that Satoshi's original paper on
bitcoin was not actually written with LaTeX. It seemed to have tricked a lot
of people (including myself).

[https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-
anything-...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-anything-in-
satoshi-nakamotos-original-bitcoin-paper-compiled-in-latex)

------
mnx
This is rendering very badly for me in Firefox. The font is very hard to read
- some parts of it are so thin, they appear invisible.
([https://screenshots.firefox.com/LHvHiygRGnaPkhsy/www.farmdoc...](https://screenshots.firefox.com/LHvHiygRGnaPkhsy/www.farmdoc.illinois.edu))

It looks mostly fine in a desktop viewer though.

------
zwerdlds
Of course, the point is moot if the journal you're submitting to only takes
LaTeX.

~~~
peatmoss
Sadly, most journals that I might submit to require Word. I published a paper
in transportation a while back, and happily submitted my manuscript for review
as an immaculately formatted PDF.

It was reviewed and accepted, which meant that they sent me the final,
_accepted_ paper submission guidelines that stipulated... Word.

------
dyates
Using LaTeX is like writing a program to automate something you do a lot:[1]
lots of effort up front for payback down the line. Once you work out how to
use it and iron out the kinks in your templates, it becomes much easier,
permanently. Whereas with Word, while you'll get started much quicker, every
sufficiently complex document will break in new and strange ways that require
extreme dexterity with a mouse and a good deal of random fiddling to fix.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/) (ignore the bottom graph)

------
madcaptenor
But is this paper written in faKe LaTeX?

I assume it is, because the author writes "As a non-LaTeX user", but I'm
having trouble verifying this by eye otherwise. Which I suppose is the point.

~~~
jwr
Oh yes, it is. My teeth hurt while reading it. There is much, much more to TeX
typesetting than just the Computer Modern fonts (which many find unattractive,
by the way).

~~~
emmelaich
One of the benefits of LaTeX is supposed to be easy switching between fonts.

I don't think I've ever seen something in LateX that didn't use Computer
Modern!

~~~
cup-of-tea
Maybe you just didn't know it was LaTeX if it wasn't Computer Modern? I
typeset my thesis using Minion and Optima.

------
zekevermillion
If we care about substance over form, papers should be written in some type of
markdown -- leave publishers, or readers even, to impose a format.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The substance often is the equations, not the words. I don't really want to
write equations in markdown, and I don't want some publisher trying to impose
a format on my equation. _I_ want to format it, so that my readers read _my_
equation, not what some publisher thought it said.

~~~
zekevermillion
Then presumably, you are either comfortable with LaTeX or else are capable of
asking your publisher to respect your wishes. For writers who are not familiar
with publishing tools, I would humbly submit that a markdown language that
formats deterministically for publication would be superior to wrangling with
MS-Word.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well, I can get LaTeX (or more precisely, LyX) to do what I want, so that on
the PDF, the equation is _exactly_ what I want it to be. I don't know if I'm
"comfortable" with it (though Lyx is _far_ easier to use than LaTeX). But I
think I have no choice. [Edit: I have no choice because the publisher doesn't
understand my paper, and doesn't understand the equations in it. The publisher
may make a change without even realizing it, and the change _may really
matter._ It's my paper, and it's my responsibility that the equations are
right.]

Second best would be "asking your publisher to respect your wishes" in the
form of looking over galley proofs, to make _sure_ that the equations came out
right.

------
jimhefferon
I can't tell. Is this genuine, or is it some kind of Poe's Law
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law))
thing?

People say pretty silly things about TeX and LaTeX, but this is so obviously
silly that I thought of it as being like an April Fool joke. On the other
hand, the sprinkling in of admiration for DEK, for instance, doesn't mesh with
that.

~~~
inteleng
The OP is definitely serious. Some people just cannot stand TeX.

