I agree that this study is certainly not large enough to draw strong conclusions, but it raises a couple of questions and some points may require attention.
I have spent many years in the TeX world. I see how lots of people use TeX : students, professionals, researchers etc... and I would easily draw 2 categories of people : - those who are programmers "in their soul" (DEK once said that 2% or so of the whole human race is gifted with programming, the same way some people are gifted to play music etc.) - those who use LaTeX "because it is the best typesetting system" People who belong to the intersection of those 2 categories will certainly be very efficient in producing documents with LaTeX, much more than what this study shows. But people from the first category may also be efficient in producing documents with Word (Word is programmable too and the typesetting engine is fancier than most people would believe). The real problem is the guys from the second category who stick to use a tool they are not comfortable with but they don't want to admit it. Over the last years, I have seen more and more students come with LaTeX documents which had a very poor appearance. There has been a lot of pressure with the rise of Linux to use LaTeX. Unfortunately the results of using LaTeX may not be up to the expectations. The tool is too complex. It can produce beautiful documents when used right, but it can also easily produce awful documents. You can also spend a lot of time in fixing details, and it happens more frequently than even proficient LaTeX users would admit. In the end, I think the tendency is to a growing number of LaTeX users who use it poorly. Finally, today, my experience is that publishers charge much more for LaTeX documents than for Word (or similar tools) documents and they are reluctant to use LaTeX because of its complexity. That was my $0.02 Fabrice 2014-12-27 11:36 GMT+01:00 M <elwood...@web.de>: > > Von: Paul Rudin <p...@rudin.co.uk> > > Datum: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 10:05:19 +0000 > > An: <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org> > > Betreff: Re: [O] Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word > > > > Ken Mankoff <mank...@gmail.com> writes: > > > >> People here might be interested in a publication from [2014-12-19 Fri] > >> available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115069 > >> > >> Title: An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used > >> in Academic Research and Development > >> > >> Summary: Word users are more efficient and have less errors than even > >> experienced LaTeX users. > >> > >> Someone here should repeat experiment and add Org into the mix, perhaps > >> Org -> ODT and/or Org -> LaTeX and see if it helps or hurts. I assume > >> Org would trump LaTeX, but would Org -> ODT or Org -> X -> DOCX (via > >> pandoc) beat straight Word? > >> > > > > No mention of emacs... who uses anything else to prepare their LaTeX? > > > Did you forget the " ;-)" or are you serious? > > Emacs is for sure a very good one, but there are a lot of popular > alternatives, if you have a look at the (for sure not representative) > voting > on the answers of this discussion here: > > http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/339/latex-editors-ides > > (It's clear, that people may have voted for several of those editors, so > that no valid statistics at all, but at least an idea...) > > Is there any real survey result about which editors LaTeX users use? > > Martin > > > > -- Fabrice Popineau ----------------------------- SUPELEC Département Informatique 3, rue Joliot Curie 91192 Gif/Yvette Cedex Tel direct : +33 (0) 169851950 Standard : +33 (0) 169851212 ------------------------------
