On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Fabrice Popineau < fabrice.popin...@supelec.fr> wrote:
> 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). > That is funny, as I still face regularly Word typeset documents that do not handle orphan lines properly, and have at least 2 fonts as "body text". Easy to fix, but a non-issue in Latex. As a researcher, handling references and cross-references is not something that is "amortized" on a one-off paper, it's something that pays off over a few documents. And in a publish-or-perish world, this does usually not take long. As a programmer, I like to be able to run one command (call it 'make' if you wish...) that will run some analysis and recompute both the figures and the document into a new version, possibly versionned. And now you know why I use orgmode too... --paf > 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 > ------------------------------ > >
