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An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
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Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#32[deleted]
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#33LaTeX 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…
To find a string in very many word files, you can use ripgrep-all: https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#34Granted it was 30 years ago but when I was a grad student in physics, there were a variety of options for how to write your dissertation. From what I observed, my guess would have been that Latex takes about twice as long as Word.
But it wasn't a fair comparison, because the students using Latex were also using Unix computers, and were genuinely interested in the nuts and bolts of the process. They were also settled on being able to push a button and have a beautiful book slide out of the laser printer.
The students who used more primitive tools simply accepted that their formatting would be more primitive. I used an antiquated scientific word processing program called T3 on a MS-DOS machine, and covered for its deficiencies by fixing my manuscript with pen and ink before taking it to be photocopied.
In my dad's dissertation from the 1950s, the equations, chemical diagrams, and graphs, are all drawn by hand. You wrote your manuscript by hand, and paid a typist to make the final copies after your committee had approved it.
Today, I think formal typesetting is disappearing. They should compare Latex, Word, Jupyter, and the e-mail editor.
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#35Some concerns with this study: 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 as…
> 40 is not an adequate sample size. Not even close.
Last time I looked for a study of a similar subject (I think I was looking for speed comparison between T9 and multi-tap input), it was something like that too: 30 or 50 students given a short exercise. And then subdivided in several categories (T9 / multitap x novice / average /expert), which brought the size of each group way below 10. The measuring criteria were also a bit weird, concentrating on the number of errors and not on the time to get a correct result. They were surprised that they were getting sensibly different results from a former study they were quoting, which was also using ridiculously low sample size...
I didn't find a proper study on that subject. I thought it would be easy to find, as it didn't seem to be a niche subject at all: on something that was in use by 100 of millions people... I was a bit appalled that such crappy papers were published, but even more by the fact that no good one was. No-one decided to run a proper one after seeing the poor ones. And don't get me started on 'meta' studies (there was one) which push the limits of laziness even further since they do no study at all and even don't reproduce or improve a former one; packing a variety of crappy studies doesn't make a good one, no more than running bloody abstract statistics over figures which were not harvested using similar methodology in the first place.
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#36I thought in science fields most publications are based on styled templates (for Word or LaTeX). So there should not be any need to 'recreate' a styled layout from scratch.
Figure and table placement is still manual per pub requirements, but page/section/font/size styling should be already defined.
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#37LaTeX 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.
> I also used git without issues
I mean, sort of? Wouldn't a .docx file have all the same annoyances within Git as something like an image, or any other binary format?
LaTeX, I can look at diffs between commits, see if someone changed a specific line, etc. Is that possible with Word?
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#38This article is trash. They can learn nothing by the methods used.
There were 40 subjects, not randomly selected, and they had no way to normalize for skill or motivation.
The tasks are mimicry, not scholarly document preparation.
The evaluation metric is not really even given.
And the biases of the researchers are evident — last line of the paper:
“preventing researchers from producing documents in LaTeX would save time and money to maximize the benefit of research and development for both the research team and the public.”
There is no way the data they have is sufficient to reach this conclusion. What an embarrassment.
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#39I'd like to see the test people try to do automatic numbering in Word. I'm a long time Word user (like 30 years), and numbering in Word has NEVER worked right.
A few weeks ago, I was tearing my hair out trying to get simple list numbering (1, 2, 3. Some non-list text. 1, 2, 3, 4...). Word seems to think that if you start numbering a list at the beginning of a doc, and then you go back to Body Text (or the horribly named Normal text), and then twenty pages later you start another list, this next list must be a continuation of the first list. What idiot decided that? You have to right-click on the first list item of the second list and do "Restart numbering at 1". And even then I was getting weird numbering of list items, like 1, 2, 5. No visible reason, and very hard to fix.
Legal section numbering in Word? Like 1, 1.1., 1.2, 2, 2.1,... Don't even try. It used to be a built-in, but it was so buggy they removed the built-in. There are instructions on the web for how to create such section numbering in Word ex nihilo, but the instructions are so complex that I haven't even tried. (And probably just as buggy as the list numbering.)
Both list and legal section numbering work out of the box in LaTeX, of course.
Re: An Efficiency Comparison of Latex vs. Word (2014)
#40[deleted]