3 ms·
“Equation text: LaTeX users made significantly fewer formatting mistakes and wrote more text within 30 minutes compared with Word novices and experts. However,
by hollandheese 3y ago
“Equation text: LaTeX users made significantly fewer formatting mistakes and wrote more text within 30 minutes compared with Word novices and experts. However, LaTeX users made significantly more orthographic and grammatical errors.”
So, LaTeX does better on what it’s primarily actually used for.
- soraminazuki 3y agoUsing "orthographic and grammatical errors" as a metric seems petty, clickbait-y, and unreliable since it has nothing to do with LaTeX.
- keernan 3y agoBut the improvement has everything to do with Word.
- frognumber 3y agoFor me, LaTeX wins on: 1. Bibtex and managing references 2. Modularity and reuse. I can break up a big document into many files, and reuse those files. 3. Collaboration and versioning. I can store things in git. 4. Scripting and automation ... and so on. I'm genuinely more productive in Word / Docs / etc. for anything less than five pages. Above 30 pages, I find things get completely unmanageable with word processors, while with LaTeX, I can use the same types of tools I use to manage, search, version, modify, and integrate source code. Word, for large documents, is a bit like writing the Windows source code in one big text file. I can swap chapter 4 and 5 in a few seconds, or move a sidebar in a similar amount of time. I can comment out an entire section by commenting one include. Etc. Oh yeah -- comments are a big thing. Word does comments, but a final version needs to be made into a "clean" copy. It's a mess.
- actuallyalys 3y agoI agree. For short documents, Word is fine. Note that Word does have reasonably good tools for moving around chapters, sections, etc., but Word tends to get slow and buggy when documents get longer. Microsoft has introduced online syncing that technically would allow multiple people to work on the same document, but it's not reliable for long documents in my experience. Personally, I use Markdown and Pandoc for most documents that are long or serious because I can work reasonably quickly while still using version control.
- d0mine 3y agoIt sounds like BS in my experience but the actual quote says: "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." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0115069 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
- hollandheese 3y agoDude, read the whole text. My quote is in there too.
- d0mine 3y agoClick the link, your quote and the paper contradict each other.
- hollandheese 3y agoTake your own advice and click the link and read the section called “Equation Text”
- d0mine 3y agoAccording to the data mentioned in "Equation Text" part, their abstract is misleading at best or just wrong (it seems we can't rely on authors to summarize their own papers accurately) e.g., the plot shows there is either no difference or LaTeX users produced slightly more text in 30 minutes: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069.g006 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/...