I think the methodology of this paper is quite weak and the results do not support the strongly opinionated conclusion the authors draw from them. The first ex

I think the methodology of this paper is quite weak and the results do not support the strongly opinionated conclusion the authors draw from them. 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.