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However, their suggestion that journals should ban submissions in LaTex seems rather bizarre. It is not the journal’s job to ensure research is done as efficiently as possible.
The first example is a plain text with a few footnotes in a two-column scientific journal layout. The participants were asked to "reproduce" this text, but the article does not explain what is meant by that. Is it a mistake if the font sizes and spacings don't exactly match? This would certainly explain why LaTeX users had a lot more "formatting errors and typos" and wrote less text (presumably they spent a lot of time trying to google a suitable template). This is not representative of typical paper writing, where you either have a template provided by the journal or you just pick something you like.
The second text are some tables and they get the unsurprising result that making tables in LaTeX really sucks.
The third text is heavy on equations and they get the unsurprising result that the Word equation editor really sucks.
From this they somehow conclude that using LaTeX is a waste of taxpayer money.
A good analysis of why this article is BS: https://lemire.me/blog/2015/01/14/knauff-and-nejasmic-recomm...
1. 40 is not an adequate sample size. Not even close.
2. Continuous text entry in LaTeX and Word is very similar, so why are LaTeX users far behind Word users here? Did the researchers measure typing speed and control for that, so that the Word group wasn't given a set of typists who were, on average, faster?
3. For the equation entry portion, did they control for user expertise when assigning participants to groups? e.g. Asking a psychologist to typeset a physics equation is going to result in slower work and more mistakes. With a sample size of 40, an imbalance of just a person or two could easily throw the whole study off. (Note: They did find that LaTeX was better for equations, which is not surprising. Their methods are still suspect though.)
4. This study does not address the specific tasks most people use LaTeX for: papers and books. Both are longer than a quick and dirty copy job, and such jobs benefit greatly from LaTeX's ability to produce consistent output when edited. Word documents break in all sorts of strange ways once they become long and complex enough.
LaTeX by itself may be less productive than Word, but it has (at least for me) several advantages that make it for me more productive: - The standard unix tools (E.g. grep) do work really well with LaTeX, if I have to find something. I would now know how to find a string in like 30-40 .doc(x) files - Works with git - Programmatically generating LaTeX is really simple as it is just text (I use this e.g. in my Vala Pro…
I see no other environment that could make these possibilities so simple and easy.
Yeah until word supports vim bindings it's not going to be very efficient.
Vim bindings, who's gonna use that? Now Emacs, that could actually be useful.
LaTeX by itself may be less productive than Word, but it has (at least for me) several advantages that make it for me more productive: - The standard unix tools (E.g. grep) do work really well with LaTeX, if I have to find something. I would now know how to find a string in like 30-40 .doc(x) files - Works with git - Programmatically generating LaTeX is really simple as it is just text (I use this e.g. in my Vala Pro…
Who needs documentation for Word. I typeset my entire thesis and never once googled how to X. I also used git without issues. With LaTeX every little thing required a search.
LaTeX by itself may be less productive than Word, but it has (at least for me) several advantages that make it for me more productive: - The standard unix tools (E.g. grep) do work really well with LaTeX, if I have to find something. I would now know how to find a string in like 30-40 .doc(x) files - Works with git - Programmatically generating LaTeX is really simple as it is just text (I use this e.g. in my Vala Pro…
Who needs documentation for Word. I typeset my entire thesis and never once googled how to X. I also used git without issues. With LaTeX every little thing required a search.