On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users | Hacker News Reader

On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users

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I would suggest the mods change the link to the study itself [0], rather than linking to a far-right extremist who is just quoting the study. Emil Kirkegaard founded OpenPsych, which largely (if not exclusively) launders far-right ideas under the guise of science [1] [2]

That way the title could also include (2014), which is when the study was published.

[0]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9909835/

[2]: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/03/12/wikipedia-war...

“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.

Using "orthographic and grammatical errors" as a metric seems petty, clickbait-y, and unreliable since it has nothing to do with LaTeX.

But the improvement has everything to do with Word.

For 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.

I 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.

It 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%2Fjourn...

Dude, read the whole text. My quote is in there too.

Click the link, your quote and the paper contradict each other.

Take your own advice and click the link and read the section called “Equation Text”

According 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/...

What's funny is that the very best note-taking software I've ever used was actually built for the competitive debate community: https://paperlessdebate.com/

I used it all through university and people would get jealous just watching me because of the power it unlocks, yet no one outside of competitive debate even knows of its existence.

For this reason, I'm addicted to word and can't switch to LaTeX unless I'm forced to.

The thing about LaTeX for me isn’t ease of use or even power. It’s the separation of content from format and the efficiency over Word over multiple uses. Example: I’ve been keeping my resume in LaTeX for years and as I’m happy with my custom template, never edit it only my job text. When I’ve used Word for this same task, I’ve had to spend a lot more time and effort for each change modifying format and content together.

    complex text with several mathematical equations

Different disciplines would consider a value of "several" reasonable that's different by orders of magnitude.

LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software.

That's tooling cults for you. I'm utterly unsurprised by this result, only masochists like TeX.

I suppose most people using LaTeX come from a scientific background. If you write math papers (for example) there is no good alternative to LaTeX. It has many issues but mostly it just works, so people are content with it.

If you want to write a novel something like Word is probably better. Or just use a typewriter if that's what you like.

This is the typical knee-jerk reply I have come to expect from LaTeX users.

Word actually had a kinda good equation editor 30 years ago, and there are numerous WYSIWYG equation editors, including ones which output to LaTeX. For more technical applications JAX does a good job. I'm not suggesting you should stop liking LaTeX, but the claim that 'there are no good alternatives' is just a pompous way of saying you prefer it to other options.

This is probably a tooling issue more than anything, right? Like if I use an editor that handles LaTeX well (such as by automatically rendering a preview as I edit, provides shortcuts to handle inserting LaTeX structures), it wouldn't be much different than Word. I think the average probably brought down by people who write LaTeX in a baisc plain text editor without any extra tooling to help them.

>>tooling issue

Except that's what word is -- four decades of tooling development and refinement. For example, people dunk on the ribbon, but the ribbon works. It's more efficient given typical screen sizes these days.

A WYSIWYG LaTeX editor is still not going to be competitive with word in most typical office use cases, acknowledging that there are absolutely uses for LaTeX.

There are non-WYSIWYG specialized editors like TeXShop.

> Except that's what word is -- four decades of tooling development and refinement

Right. That's my point. People don't tend to write doc files by hand they use tools (word processors) to write them automatically. There are tools (with decades of refinement behind them) for building LaTeX documents automatically. The average is brought down on the LaTeX side, because not everyone uses those tools.

If you exclude the people who write LaTeX documents by hand (as it is reasonable to exclude people who write doc files by hand) it's probably a much less significant difference.

You use LaTeX because it's simpler to work with than word, not because it produces better output.

In the same way that I walk to work because it's faster than a helicopter.

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