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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 otherwis
by madcaptenor 9y ago
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.
- IAmEveryone 9y agoWould LaTex hyphenate “Mi- crosoft”. It struck me as particularly ugly.
- madcaptenor 9y agoThere was a time in my life when I would have noticed that, but I haven't actually written LaTeX in years.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoYes, there are two big giveaways in the article. The first is how the word LaTeX is typeset. This has a command that produces a much fancier typesetting in most LaTeX documents. The second big giveaway is a bit deeper into the paper > It turns out there is an alternative that satisfies my economist mindset—FaKe LaTeX documents created in Microsoft Word. That is exactly how I produced this note.
- proaralyst 9y agoThere's also the awful justification throughout.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoWell he did cite a study showing that people were more productive using Word than LaTeX. That's a very good justification assuming it's factually accurate and the productivity gap is meaningful. Most of his complaints about how hard it is to use LaTeX seem absurd, but that doesn't mean he isn't experiencing them or that they aren't common among less technical users.
- proaralyst 9y agoSorry, I meant justification as in the typesetting sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Justified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Justifie... This is something TeX is _very_ good at. Word, less so.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoAh, I think he mentioned that as one of the things Word can't mimic.
- jwr 9y agoOh 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 9y agoOne 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 9y agoMaybe you just didn't know it was LaTeX if it wasn't Computer Modern? I typeset my thesis using Minion and Optima.
- lainga 9y agoOn that note, I wasn't aware you could get Computer Modern as a font in Word (having tried once!).
- mmusson 9y agoI can tell instantly from the poor spacing of the justified text. Word makes obviously poor choices that TeX would not. Word could use the same algorithm used by TeX. I have read that the codebase for Word includes a significant amount of legacy code attempting to maintain backward compatibility, so they are probably stuck with the layout code currently used.