I love the concept of Latex, but usability it pretty terrible. We really need a modernized approach. Something akin to HTML but specifically for printed documents.
Please, no. I've written thousands of pages in LaTeX, and it's far more usable than most tools IF you can resist trying to overcomplicate things. For example, want a diagram? If you do it in xfig/inkscape/omnigraffle, you'll have little pain. If you decide to get clever and try to programmatically do it via tikz or some other package, you've opened up a world of pain.
The level of pain experienced by LaTeX users in my experience is more often poor choices made by the users who create unnecessary complexity. Avoid that, and it's a pretty reasonable model to work in.
Sure, but it's probably possible to design something better too, that would let users do more complex things without dying. Maybe you don't need it for your usage, but this seems a bit like a Blub problem[1].
Keep the same core design of compiled source code files, but there are many things that don't make any sense. As just one example having to use the `\makeatletter` / `\makeatother` hack to change the visibility of macros seems completely insane to me when we have had languages with fine-grained visibility control for decades. This is one of the many things that make using many packages together needlessly hard.
Sure! But the same is true of Word, or CSS for that matter. Any layout system is going to run into this issue: since the space of possible layouts is so big, it's almost inevitable that users will decide they want something that isn't well supported by the system. If the system is sufficiently powerful, they will be able to achieve their desired layout, at the cost of wrecking usability / maintainability.
MS word is also perfectly usable, as long as you don't try to do anything weird (as the example in the article illustrates!).
I love LaTeX for writing math-heavy documents, but as soon as it involves figures, images or pseudo-code it is quite horrible compared to Word.
For me, the ideal solution would be something WordPerfect but with ability to type LaTeX equations.
I want to be able to manipulate the "code" of the document but with a nice UI with real-time preview that helps me placing and formatting figures, text boxes for pseudo-code etc.
Seems like a step backwards. One of the great things about Latex (or raw tex) is that you can simply type it into a buffer. No need to mouse around to select text or anything like that. Hard to find anything really more usable than that.
Back in 1984 I wrote a small WYSIWYG editor at PARC that outputted primitive LaTex. Fortunately LaTeX was quite early stage and that little project went nowhere. But one of the lessons was that semantic markup was much easier to do by just typing rather than trying to infer it context, while -driven changes meant people usually just changed font and size and erased the semantic anyway. This has been borne out by Word.
Edit: added bit starting “But one of...” to explain my comment
I think the grandparent is talking about a better WYGIWYG language, like HTML generally is. You can (and most people, at least on HN, probably do) edit HTML in a buffer.
> One of the great things about Latex (or raw tex) is that you can simply type it into a buffer. No need to mouse around to select text or anything like that. Hard to find anything really more usable than that.
More usable for you perhaps, but certainly not for me.
.title My concerns with the point made by Hacker News user gumby
If you were to write something like HTML, how would you do so in a manner that didn't involve raw text? Sure it might be [emph shown] in a marked up way, but then doesn't your LaTeX editor do this?
And if your editor does this, how can you be sure that the new markup language for documents are not, in fact, superior in readability and expressiveness to LaTeX?
I mean, the made up formatting I tried to show in this comment is more readable and extendable than LaTeX (in my eyes, anyway), but it is still raw text.
But then surely the h1 document title should be above that, which would be "=" (1), so a chapter is below at "==" (2)?
\part apparently is -1 in latex, which would be seem to be odd.
But document title isn't part of the latex sectioning hierarchy...
Given that there is a document title, part and chapter, chapter could maybe "===" (3) or maybe "==" (2) if we're not using parts or we don't consider the document title.
I think anyway?
It's unfortunate that the creators of latex did not
follow the HTML heading rules better. (despite latex pre-dating html of course)
True, it is more self-describing and that has some real benefits. What I typically found was that I didn't like writing in LaTeX for the same reason I don't like writing in HTML -- the syntax occupies more space and so it gets more attention, which pulls me away from the thoughts I was actually trying to write.
I keep my custom commands and styles in a separate tex file that I `\input` into the document file I am working on. The document file usually looks very clean with this method. It feels very much like HTML and CSS to me.
I disagree. The answer is not found yet. Even when using semantic HTML elements it's too much of a styling language. We need a system that solves the overlapping markup problem and is fully semantic.
I have seen here similar opinions about HTML vs. PDF in a few other threads.
However, this is a matter of personal opinion and I am certain that nobody knows how many people prefer PDF and how many prefer HTML.
I strongly prefer PDF for any non-ephemeral content that I might need to read twice or more times, so I hate anyone who forces me to read an HTML user manual or scientific paper, instead of providing PDF documents for them.
Even if HTML can be opened on every device, it also looks different on every device and it looks bad on those that are different from the one used by the developer (unless the HTML pages have been carefully designed to look good on various devices, which seldom happens).
Even on a small smartphone screen, I prefer a good PDF viewer with a good user interface that makes it easy to zoom & pan, instead of the feeble attempts of the Web browsers to reformat the text, which make very difficult the navigation through complex technical documents.
"Print" support is horrible for HTML. Modern Web pages, which use a lot of JS, are almost always mutilated when you use the "Print" command in both Chrome and Firefox, even if they display the pages correctly outside the "Print" mode.
- You can write TeX documents as a single file with ease
- Phones are not designed for reading, so dynamic layout or not, it will still be inferior to finely typeset document
- With care so can be TeX; carelessly written HTML docs will be just as bad as anything else
- CSS is a pretty poor layout tool; typographically speaking, CSS is very subpar to TeX's capabilities, using JS... well how much better is it than just using macros in TeX/LaTeX?
- markdown is fine for simple stuff but for highly complicated documents involving lots of generated tables, lists, and mathematics it is almost like having no tool at all;
- but many people DO like printed documents (I rarely can stand reading anything but basic technical stuff on screen, say language reference is fine but anything that requires thinking, has to be printed);
TeX is not locked to pdf in any way (it is not even it's native format). HTML's support for formulas is primitive (the only decent tools available are ... based on TeX). Academic world is not entirely uniform either but while I do think LaTeX is not ideal (TeX is though), I simply shudder when I think about Word or any MS or Adobe products.
Counter counter point: I pretty regularly read pdf docs on my phone, and it’s a horrible experience.
I went so far as to write a script that downloads the Tex source of a paper from arxiv, changes up the paper size to match my phone screen, and recompiles the paper. It’s ok for text-heavy documents, but doesn’t work well for most figures. And most of my field does not post preprints (or use LaTeX at all).
For me the ideal solution would be something like org mode -> html output. I think the main gap that isn’t really addressed by any tool I’ve seen is reference management
> Phones are not designed for reading, so dynamic layout or not, it will still be inferior to finely typeset document
Personally, I find my phone to be my favorite medium to read prose on, not inferior to anything – including printed paper, which I never use if I can help it. It works for books and most webpages, but PDFs are a disaster.
My second preference is my laptop. Its screen is big enough to make reading PDFs an acceptable experience, but not a great one. When viewing at an optimal zoom level for me, there's almost enough vertical space to fit an entire normally-sized page… but not quite. Which means I have to scroll. In the common case that the paper has two columns, I have to scroll down to read the bottom left of the page, then back up to read the top right, then back down to read the bottom right.
Oh, and it's always great hunting for the figures in a paper, because of course they have to be nicely lined up in a corner of a page, even if that leaves them far from the text that references them. It's a compromise that makes total sense in print, but feels silly on a screen.
So TeX's output is good in print but awkward on a screen. (It may not be limited to PDF, but I'm pretty sure all its output formats assume a fixed page size.) Meanwhile, HTML is good on a screen, but I agree that it's awkward in print.
What we need is a format that's good at both, and that doesn't currently exist.
Try reading pdf's using Tofu.app. Lexcyle's Stanza had the same functionality, but Amazon killed it. I don't know if there are any Unix or Windows programs with the same functionality.
If you are creating pdf's, you are not limited to portrait/a4/letter, you can specify landscape/size of your laptop screen and use newspaper columns.
Well, the entire idea of SGML, on which HTML is based, is to use a custom markup vocabulary adequate for your project (this is distinctively more pronounced in SGML which originally always had to have a DTD than it is in XML with its various additional, optional schema mechanisms targeted at enterprise use). However, HTML is almost the same markup vocabulary for casual academic publishing at CERN it was 30 years ago; with everything around it (CSS, JS) having changed beyond recognition. It is understandable that once JS was out there (plus div and span generic containers), evolving HTML wasn't essential as you could always fallback to using JS. Styling factored out into an ever-growing ad-hoc language with low barriers to changes called CSS further contributed to the fossilization of HTML, yet the fixation towards a 1990s vision of HTML can't entirely be explained by these two factors alone. My guess is that HTML was locked in W3C's long-standing, failed attempt to replace SGML by its subset XML as meta-syntax. With WHATWG's HTML5, parsing was specified in a procedural way, and self-contained in the HTML spec itself rather than in reference to SGML or XML. The way the HTML5 grammar was presented, though, could only lead to further hindrance of its evolution since Ian Hickson captured only the result grammar of HTML4, but not its original construction rules and principles. For example, in [1] I make the point that
> By recovering HTML's original parsing rules from HTML5's specification text, we conclude that HTML5's parsing rules are represented adequately, and more succinctly, since avoiding redundantly specifying p-terminating elements.
> This interpretation is also supported by the fact that for the HTML5.1 specification update (vs. HTML5), the new details, figcaption, figure and menu elements (which are flow-only elements) but not the new picture element (which can also be used in phrasing content) have been added to the set of p-terminating elements.
All in all, HTML doesn't appear to be a rational, recommendable authoring format for any non-trivial writing project. After more than 30 years, it's still SGML that has all the power needed: can handle markdown and other custom Wiki syntax, can deal with and produce any HTML, has stylesheets and type-safe text macro expansion and templating. For the LISP lovers on HN, there's even the OpenJade project (dormant since about 2008 or so) for using Scheme-based DSSSL with SGML.
I never use Microsoft Word / Open Office to produce documents. If it has to be quick and dirty I just go to overleaf and maybe look up a template. The documents always look nicer this way.
>The boss needed item 3 inserted into a numbered list of hundreds of items. The intern used a mouse to select the original 3 on the screen, then typed 4, then selected the original 4, then typed 5, then scrolled down, then selected the original 5, then typed 6, and so on. Another intern sat watching the screen to make sure there were no mistakes.
Microsoft Word has automatic numbering. Just to be sure, I opened Word, and entered a numbered list. When I inserted a new numbered item, it automatically renumbered the list. Also, converting from a numbered list to bullet points is as simple as selecting the list and clicking the bullets icon instead of the numbered list icon.
This opening anecdote makes me think the author is completely unfamiliar with Word, and is strawmanning it.
Given that he's apparently relaying something that actually happened, Bernstein can't be strawmanning it. In fact he can't be strawmanning it at all, as Microsoft Word doesn't make arguments or claims. You appear to mean something more like "Bernstein is incorrectly portraying how Microsoft Word works." But as I said Bernstein presents this story as something that actually happened, not a hypothetical example, so I guess what you actually mean is "I suspect Bernstein is making up this story"?
Regardless, Bernstein does in fact address this criticism in the note added yesterday. Yes, it has automatic list numbering, but in order to achieve the desired formatting, the users had, instead of altering the formatting appropriately, removed this automatic numbering, because Microsoft Word doesn't make these sorts of distinctions clear and explicit.
> the users had, instead of altering the formatting appropriately, removed this automatic numbering, because Microsoft Word doesn't make these sorts of distinctions clear and explicit.
You can get into much worse situations than this once you leave the "happy path" in LaTeX.
If the argument that people who use Word that don't really know how to use it can end up using it inefficient ways, then doesn't it even more apply to Latex. I could probably come up with an anecdote about someone who tried to use Latex but spent hours trying to figure out how to get the format they wanted and got frustrating trying to debug their scripts.
If we want to compare tools, we should not compare expert users of one tool with novices of another tool.
Is there a single serious LaTeX user that doesn't have a story of losing hours of time because they didn't understand some of the internals well enough? I've probably lost days before.
If you have never run into problems with macros expanding in the wrong sort of environment then you have probably not used it very extensively. If you have run into the problem of switching commands because of their fragile-ness then is it true that you never lost any time debugging?
I run into all sorts of problems with Word's automatic numbering when I try to leave space, insert images, tables, or a make sublist. And it's never clear to me what the issue is.
LaTeX seems much more predictable. I have a file with my custom commands and styles that I `\input` and use always use consistent style. Nothing too crazy. But I also never try to do anything too crazy in Word, either.
1. Word has automatic numbering, true, but it's not necessarily designed for the sort that was used in this paper.
2. From the article:
> Note added 2020.12.07: ... Each item in the list looked like a flush-left paragraph, like the paragraphs in this blog post, adjacent to the left margin.
They were numbering paragraphs, not line items, and lines that wrapped were supposed to be left-justified. I don't think this is a strawman.
3. MS Word would have a fit with skipping a number before "They" in the sentence above, and assigning number 3 and not 1 to this paragraph.
4. There are other cases when you need to separately label Article 1/Section A/Clause I etc. in a hierarchy; the numbered list tabulation and hopefully semantic Heading 1/Heading 2/Heading 3 styles and tables of contents in Word can handle this for your use case, but be prepared for frustration if you want something a little different than what the UI is designed to help you build.
>They were numbering paragraphs, not line items, and lines that wrapped were supposed to be left-justified. I don't think this is a strawman.
Word allows you to adjust the indentation on numbered lists so that the text in a paragraph is flush with the left margin. In Word 365 there are at least two ways to do this:
1. View -> Show -> [check Ruler] -> [Adjust the indentation on the ruler]
2. Layout -> Paragraph -> [click lower right arrow] Paragraph Settings -> Indentation -> change Special from (hanging) to (none), or change the "By:" value to 0
So the author's motivating example doesn't seem to be a particularly fair criticism of Word.
But only about 10% of Word users are aware of this feature (granted, the other 90% wouldn’t enjoy LaTeX either).
And if you see another document where this is done, you still don’t know how to do that yourself.
It's not a critisism on the possibility of doing this in Word. It's the critisism that at least three people (the document creator and two interns) did not use it, either due to ignorance or because Word has frequent problems with automatic lists. Either way, this is a problem with Word.
For me, Word and LaTeX are on par. Styles, referencing, formula, macros, auto-layout are possible in both. However real-world use is different because Word is the lowest common denominator and thus mostly only the basic features actually get used. Because everybody experienced the horror of automatic features at least once.
Automatic numbering in Word is a nightmare. A separate list created pages before will continue its numbering onto a new list several pages behind. I always type lists as #1,#2,#3 as a crosshatch+digit does not call automatic numbering. Even if you turn it off, a collaborator might turn it back on, resulting in chaos.
In using Word with long documents, I'm reminded of pilots' early criticism of Airbus software, "What's it doing now?"
I swear this whole thread could be best described as:
"Geeks that have read 2000 man pages about LaTex and have never bothered to browse Word docs complain about missing feature in Word that is actually in Word since the last millenium" :-))
Word lets you change the styles of every level of indention in an outline/list, including, for example, by left-justifying list items instead of indenting them on subsequent lines.
If that is the case, part of the problem is the article's author was comparing a potentially complex example of numbering in Word with a trivial example of numbering in LaTeX. That trivial case in LaTeX led me to question the whole premise of the article since the example seemed to be cherry picking end users who didn't know how to use Word, or at least a case where the person who setup the document didn't know how to use Word and the editors did not have the authority to fix the issue properly.
Office word processor designed for basic documents can't compete with academic/technical typesetting tool for academic/technical applications?
I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side.
Word and LaTeX not comparable tools and they're not designed for the same job. Comparing them makes as much sense as comparing a bicycle with a skateboard.
> I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side.
I wrote a ~200 page (digital) textbook on 3d Modeling using Word.
Word is incredibly customizable, I had hotkeys setup to do everything I wanted, figures and diagrams manages themselves rather well, and I was easily able to get into a state of flow using Word.
Now it took several days to get Word that customized, but having seen what it can do, I will not call it mediocre.
However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise.
Should be noted I wasn't doing any typesetting or any such thing, just writing the document, I understand that beyond just writing, LaTeX is a far superior tool.
I've used MS Word over very many years and I'm happy to say that it is a far better product now than it ever was in terms of reliability and doing what it's supposed to do. I'd even call it... good.
But that is now, and the number of times I've been burned in the past and watched other people being burned, and the distress it is caused those who just want to get their job done and the time wasted; those memories fade slowly.
This. Word is decent until it becomes a crashing, byzantine reformatting mess. Then it becomes some kind of obscene torture device as bug states propagate with the documents and restarting only brings inescapable anxiety.
I'm right (write?) there with you. I routinely write documents hundreds of pages long in Word that are filled with cross-references, figures, complex tables, and Visio objects. Word is very solid (though it wasn't always so) and maintains really good performance even with large documents. Cutting and pasting massive amounts of content from one place to another in the document can be done with more or less reckless abandon.
My hot Word tip is to use Styles. My other hot Word tip is to use cross-references. If you type "See Figure 3-1" in full, you're doing it wrong.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please fix a) the unreadable text in the Styles drop-down selection list in dark mode and b) stop asking my if the large amount of data I put on the clipboard should be available to other apps when I exit Word. With SSDs, this anachronism takes me far longer to read and click No to vs. just saving the damn clipboard content without asking me.
This works great with your own document or small experienced group. But let any "normal" person do any changes... and you're back to local modifications. And is actually hard to figure out what was done ad-hoc and what via styles.
Thanks a lot. This is exactly what one needs to do when using Word Documents in a group setting. Always.
We enforce this and it makes it so much easier for everybody. We also enforce that no one is allowed to mess with the style definitions once they are fixed for the specific project.
It is the same as if one is using code formatting rules and enforces them by configuration of linting tools.
Do some people complain, because they cannot do their personal pet peeve? Sure. Do I care in terms of the greater good for the project or the team? Only in so far as I learn not to want said people in my projects/teams.
Do some people point out specific and relevant flaws in the designe/code/style rules? Sure. Do they count? Hell yes. I love these people in my teams/projects. They know how to understand systems, think systematically and also how to communicate relevant criticism in a productive way.
> It is the same as if one is using code formatting rules and enforces them by configuration of linting tools.
Feature request: some sort of ML in Word that detects when someone is using spaces to line text up between lines, stops them, and pops up a tutorial on using the ruler.
I think people with no LaTeX experience would not have a shiny "Bold" option in front of them and would either see usage in other places which already has expected formatting, or would have to read up on what LaTeX is in general.
It's not that they can't easily mess up. Instead there's a higher barrier to do that - once you're past it, you have more understanding of the system.
> and maintains really good performance even with large documents
Out of curiosity how large were these documents, and were they completely text or did they contain a fair number of images?
I'm asking since I once ran into a situation with a long and image-filled Word document (150 ish pages, maybe 50 high res images) where there was a noticeable lag when typing and saving would take 30s.
My documents contain a fair number of images. For me, a large document is 200-300 pages and 20-30 Meg in size saved in docx format. I didn't count but I'd probably have well over 50 images - maybe double that??? However, I do put my images in at a fairly low resolution (maybe 1280 x 800 or something) to keep the file size under control. There is no noticable difference in the final product (at least for my purposes), it makes it practical to transfer my document back to our master file server over my peasant internet connection, and it keeps the file size reasonable enough to allow us to email a PDF version to our clients. Word has some feature I can't remember the name of off the top of my head that will optimize image sizes like this automagically for you.
It might be so on Windows, but on Mac Word has been surprisingly buggy. I don’t think there’s a day I don’t find something. Yesterday it failed to print page 2 of a document when page 1 was empty. Am using it for my colleagues sake, all personal writing is in Tex
Office on mac is just a shadow of the windows version. It kind of looks the same but all the crazy plugins and stuff does not exist (could be a pro but is mostly a downside).
My experience with word documents with large number of cross references (think 500+), is that after some time they tend to get 'corrupt' and just don't work correctly anymore. At an old job where we prepared teaching material, we went through the effort of converting all of our materials (1000+ pages) to Latex just because of the lost productivity.
> However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise.
This points to the real criticism of Word: that its internal representation of text is quite different to its appearance (i.e. WYSIWYG does not imply WYSIWYM) and if you make even a little use of its advanced features and reedit, you will quite likely get a document that behaves perversely. I have quite often seen Word users give up on reformatting a section, cut and paste it into another application and then cut and paste-back-without-styling so that they can reformat from scratch.
Quite a few of the properties a run of text might have are not controlled by styles, and Format Painter makes gives a uniform format for all the selected text: if you go this route, you still might have lots of hand reformatting to do.
The point I was making is that the more of Word's advanced features you use, the more of these kinds of mismatch you risk encountering.
Did they fix this bug, where images in text-boxes where omitted from the automatically generated figure list? This caught me off-guard during my thesis.
I don't think people are saying it can't be done. I think people are saying if you value your time or care about the risk of failure, you wouldn't do it like that.
Downside with pictures in text boxes - you can't put footnotes in text boxes so if you need to cite pictures with any of the referencing styles that use footnotes that makes it a no go. It's an awkward and arbitrary limitation that ruins Word for a surprisingly common use case
How do you get rid of Word's insistence to select text that I do not want to be selected?
That is the one feature of Word that drives me nuts as a LaTeX and markdown user. I'm sure there must be a setting to change it somewhere, though. Right?
I heartily agree with everything the parent says other than "Word is a pretty mediocre product". Advanced functionality like field codes allow you to get surprisingly deep.
A comparison of FrameMaker and Latex would be a more interesting exercise, I think.
This is not “from the other side”. Note that, despite the editorialized title of the HN submission here (Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex), what the link contains is primarily a criticism of a paper that did compare the (what you called) “not comparable tools”, but did so very poorly. The criticism is sound, so whether LaTeX is in fact better along some dimension than Word is secondary, IMO. And if (as you say) comparing them is nonsensical in the first place, then that would only strengthen criticism of the paper.
Latex is pretty mediocre on a lot of fronts too: almost any operation outside writing ASCII text or equations requires to search the web for a package or a specific tricky use of commands (the last comically long of such commands I have to use was to insert a normally looking tilde in text), which make working with it painfully slow. In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box.
> Latex is pretty mediocre on a lot of fronts too: almost any operation outside writing ASCII text or equations requires to search the web for a package or a specific tricky use of commands (...), which make working with it painfully slow.
The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint.
Most of the extra features I used only required a single command in the preamble to get everything to work out-of-the-box. And I mean everything.
> In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box.
...except when it does not. I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason, or to get images to play nice with their captions so that they break in the same page.
Latex with an editor as good as Intellij is for java (or perhaps VisualStudio for C#) would make it so much better. I have mostly used online latex tools since setting up the pipeline is simply too much work for the medium projects I have done.
"The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint."
shrug I can also say "the only issue you're referring to is discoverability of the advanced features of Word".
"I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason,"
You literally right-click on the "Heading 1" style in a brand new Word document, select "Modify" (as in "modify this style", quite obvious), under "Format" click on "Numbering" and select one of several numbering styles. I spend more time looking up how to do Markdown numbered headings markup than that - and that's not a complaint, I don't spend a lot of time on that at all.
Look, I dislike non-semantic markup too. But all the whining about how if only those Word using idiots would just switch to Latex and all would be well in the world is getting old, and not only that, it's just wrong. Yes it's easy to make a pdf that looks like the default ugly Latex style, but beyond that, it's a massive time sink for even the tiniest modifications. All of these tools suck, some just suck a bit less for specific jobs than others. Claiming that Latex is 'superior' to Word is like saying that a tractor is superior to a bicycle because you can't pull a plow with a bicycle. I mean, sure, that's true - but there are many more criteria for judging modes of transport, just as there are multiple for document preparation systems, and Word wins on some criteria and Latex on others.
They absolutely are comparable. They are the primary tool many academics use to prepare papers. In engineering I’d say it’s a 50:50 split between those using one or the other.
Most students use Word while the exceptional ones have already embraced LaTeX.
I guess you never wrote a long document in Word full of equations that become unreadable at 6am a few hours before the deadline.
(IIRC the automatic backup was readable, and I recovered most of the work from there. But one of the equations was cursed, and I had to delete and rewrite it. (I probably had a handmade backup, just in case, but it was a few hours old.))
> My guess is that people struggle more with Image placement in LaTeX by a huge margin.
You should guess again.
With LaTeX the biggest problem with images is seeig them reflow in a place you wasn't expecting because you did not paid attention to what you actually did.
With Word, you even have to fight it to not put images and their image captions on separate pages.
More importantly, with LaTeX the worst you get with images is them looking nice and neat in some other part of the text, maybe at the end of a section or with a single paragraph between them. With Word it's on par for the course to get your whole doc screwed up just because the image reflowed to the next page.
With Word, you even have to fight it to not put images and their image captions on separate pages.
You keep saying this, and this has simply not been true since Word 2007. You keep captions on the same page as their respective pictures using the same method you keep all lines of a paragraph on the same page: Keep with Next in Paragraph options. If a caption (or picture) still flows onto the next page, that is because it simply won't fit into the page without resizing the picture or changing the page margins.
Word has compiler errors, and it even has bugs in its compiler sometimes (Word 2007 has one where it needed a character to show a table cell when that cell contained nothing but a certain kind of image; this was fixed in Word 2010+ but not there).
This is only really relevant if you're generating Word documents programatically from other data sources (it's very easy to do this with the MS-provided tools which can auto-generate code-behind for programs that need to make documents like this), but it's entirely possible to end up with invalid OOXML that means the document doesn't load.
context from the start used the pdftex engine and lua was a first class citizen. havent used it in a while but it's quite different from latex, it's much closer to original tex.
while latex needs plugins for many extra features from all kinds of sources, and these plugins sometimes fight between themselves, context is more like bsd or django: comes with batteries included and i found it a much nicer experience.
"LaTeX users being more satisfied than Microsoft Word users and (2) KN claiming that Microsoft Word is more efficient"
There is no conflict in this statement, despite the author's claim. People who walk to work (for reasonable distances) will also tend to feel better, even though it took them longer.
Efficiency and satisfaction are different things. One is subjective ("how do you feel?"), the other objective (amount of work done per time). You are free to assign any relative value you like to these objectives, neither one is objectively "more important" than the other in all cases.
But entirely denying a measurable result while being offended by the idea that, maybe, the measurable satisfaction LaTeX gives you could also, theoretically, possibly, cloud your judgement, is silly. It's literally a textbook example of a cognitive bias!
I suspect the root cause here may be how much the tech scene loves to pretend to be "objective" / "neutral" / "scientific". If people were to consider the idea that they are just bundles of emotions, like everyone else, and, most importantly that there's nothing wrong with that, it would vastly improve some parts of the discourse.
You chose LaTeX because (a) you prefer to spend an hour with a keyboard to spending 30 min with a mouse, because (b) it's part of the identity you've chosen for yourself, because (c) it gives your work that cool Bell Labs vibe, because (d) your peers would judge you, because (e) your peers chose it for you, because (e) you didn't invest a month into learning it to abandon it, because (f) you built this really cool continuous integration pipeline from your lab to Nature, or because (g) you're the type of person that noticed I used (e) twice, and those people just tend towards LaTeX.
Some of these are emotional reasons. That doesn't mean they are invalid! You don't need to rationalise them. Be irrational and proud of it–it's been cool among a majority of numbers for a long time.
The author does not say 'conflict', he uses 'contrast' instead which is perfectly justified. Your subtly offensive (a)-(g) list seems to imply that the reasons for this contrast are rooted solely in the emotions of those who use LaTeX. I am fine with that but I am not sure I would agree with your (a): for me it is more like 10 min with a keyboard vs 2 hrs with a mouse.
I agree that subjective and emotional reasoning are perfectly valid in choosing a tool, but disagree a bit with your take on efficiency.
Efficiency isn’t a measure of how long a task takes, it’s about how much additional work is performed relative to the optimal path. Waking vs driving to work is an interesting example because it depends on what you count as work when you frame the problem. Driving requires your body to less work, but walking costs less energy overall because you don’t have to accelerate and move a heavy vehicle.
I prefer LaTeX (specifically via org mode) because it feels like there is less cognitive overhead to me. References are magical (especially with org-ref), I don’t have to fight with the layout algorithm to keep my train of thought as i move my cursor around and edit text, emacs keybindings....
This is all in tension with collaborative writing, since most people in my field don’t use LaTeX or org mode. Here I prefer GDocs to Word in large part because at least my browser understands some basic emacs keybindings.
"The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. 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. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors."
My latex documents often have formatting errors: lines extending into the margin, not properly breaking up words on line breaks, text flowing into other text in two column layouts.
It takes a significant amount of work to get rid of those for me and I usually do not fix all of them in the end, because some minor ones are more work than they are worth.
For my latest document I finally made the same decision, just so I can focus on the text instead of the errors! But I haven't thought about keeping it at .5pt, I will probably do that, thank you.
I will note that I feel much more productive in LaTeX or more powerful editors. I think some of that, however, is due to the fact that my brain is contently busy on the cognitively fulfilling task to develop a regex to do this find-replace instead of frustratedly waiting on my slow motor cortex as it drives a mouse cursor across the screen. See also the studies in [1], previously discussed on HN.
I do a lot of work in a myriad of vendor-provided software with various degrees of quality for industrial control systems. I'm always grateful when they (1) don't mess with OS-provided text entry commands like tab stops to move between fields, F2 to start editing, enter or shift-enter to accept, copy paste, etc. and (2) provide a plain-text import-export utility. Literally today, I was faced with the barely unusual requirement to add a total of 1200 logic elements among 5 sets of 20 very similar lines of ladder logic to a program , I was grateful for the ability to do those 5 basic rungs once, export that section of logic, and run some regexes to generate all 100 rungs instead of being stuck using the mouse and clicking the add contact icon, scrolling to select the tag in the list, clicking the add coil icon, and scrolling to its tag, ad nauseam. A task that would have taken hours instead took just a couple minutes!
However, I have observed that I feel better about these productivity wins and worse about some pragmatic drudge work than an objective analysis from the clock actually supports. Instead of boasting about the 'big win' on HN, had I been forced to spend half a day entering that logic manually, I would probably have complained about the vendor's awful UI for weeks, denigrating their hardware at the next project's quote phase. Realistically, though, it wouldn't have taken that much effort to do it manually. Similarly, I have no doubt that when trying to do something 4 times, it's often faster to just do it manually all 4 times, rather than copy-paste, keyboard navigation, find-replace, and edit machinations to make that happen.
A detail-oriented engineer would want to amend the chart to note that you should be willing to spend 1.25 years on making a daily task shorter by 6 hours, or 8.5 months making a weekly task shorter by 1 day.
Regardless, it should go right next to https://xkcd.com/1319/, though that may be less helpful as a reference and instead induce an existential crisis...
I tried to build my thesis using LaTeX. The uni doesn't have LaTeX template available, so I have to create them from scratch. It was a ludicrous task, so I stopped doing it and used Word instead despite of all the quirks.
If the first time you come into contact with LaTeX is when doing your thesis then I can see why you stopped. Preferably you would have used LaTeX for writing project reports in other courses. If you don't have to enter equations all over your thesis then I would say LaTeX is a bit overkill, markdown probably would have worked as well or Word as you mentioned.
Mine required a PDF submission that met very strict formatting guidelines, but they didn't have a LaTeX template available either. I asked the graduate student help desk if I could use one from a former student's GitHub repo, and they said "oh yeah, that's what everybody else uses..." This at a school with 10k+ grad students.
My uni had a latex template that was made and updated by one of the professors and it was glorious. No fussing about with styles or anything, just writing the content.
For anyone who thinks that the author here (D. J. Bernstein) is biased in favour of LaTeX, he has elsewhere written one of the most stinging criticisms I've seen: https://cr.yp.to/writing/visual.html (LaTeX haters, enjoy!)
The point of this blog post here (the OP) is just that the study by Knauff and Nejasmic is really awful, for the reasons it mentions: studies the wrong metric, etc. (Of course typing "see [41]" would be more efficient than typing "see \cite{multiplication-survey}" for instance.) Far from the authors' claim of a “highly realistic working conditions”.
(Also this blog post is titled “part 1” so I imagine there will be future blog posts either on this specific topic, or on measuring the wrong metric, in general?)
Edit: Some of the comments here seemed odd to me, until I noticed that this HN submission is titled “Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration [sic]: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex [sic]”, while the actual blog post is titled “Optimizing for the wrong metric, part 1: Microsoft Word” and has the subtitle “Review of "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" by Knauff and Nejasmic.” From the HN submission title, I can imagine that before clicking one may expect the link to contain a measurement or comparison, rather than a review of some paper. Titles of articles are already (in general) a poor indicator of their contents, but please don't editorialize titles to make them less representative!
Bernstein's post is more a criticism of Lamport's claim[1] that
> Even using LaTeX, which does not make the final formatting very easy, I usually spend less than two minutes per page doing the final formatting to produce camera-ready output
and less a criticism regarding the superiority of logical (i.e. semantic) document editing systems over visual (WYSIWYG) editors. Lamport even says[2]
> I know of no purely logical system that is currently available. Systems like Scribe and LaTeX permit the user to describe the visual appearance as well as the logical structure of the document—for example, by inserting a command to add a quarter-inch vertical space. The need to provide the user with such commands is a symptom of the deficiencies of these systems.
That diatribe is simply demonstrating that somebody made a broken LaTeX style. It has nothing to do with LaTeX nor with Lamport’s article.
I find it disingenuous of Bernstein to use the existence of a broken style as if it were a counterexample to Lamport’s points. This is not what I would call a “stinging criticism”.
The issue is not really specific to this pair of LaTeX styles, in my experience.
I'm not sure why you call the style broken: the final result looks fine, and DJB didn't have to fix any errors in the style itself, only in his document. (Also, the author of the style is a translator and co-author of IMO the best introductory book on TeX—comes highly recommended by Hans Hagen in the ConTeXt manual too, as “the book that turns every beginner into an expert”—though of course LaTeX conventions are a different beast and it's possible that the expertise doesn't carry over.)
Rather, my experience is that for any nontrivial document, simply changing the LaTeX style (\documentclass) from one to another (like amsart to msripub here, or just one journal's house style to another independent one) is unlikely to be enough; the amount of work required is likely to be much more than the indicated “two minutes”.
So what that story points out is that one of the promises of LaTeX (that particular one, of being able to change styles easily) doesn't hold up too well in practice (not many people try it), and the fact that this page starkly shows the typical results one would get on trying is what makes it sting IMO. Or at least so I imagine (I'm not much of a LaTeX fan, more of a plain TeX one).
Well there must be something that I’m failing to understand then. His example of what he got when switching to msripub is obviously broken; just look at the run-on bibliographic entries. But it’s been a few days and I admit I didn’t read the article with great care in the first place, so I’ll take another look. But if there were actual errors in his document, that’s another reason he should not have been drawing conclusions about LaTeX.
Personally, I’ve had much better luck when switching styles. I think, though, that plain TeX is greatly underused, especially as, when there are problems, they are often conflicts among LaTeX packages. What do you do about cross references and bibliographies? (That’s the selling point of LaTeX for me, not the formatting stuff.)
I think the point is that the same document can compile without errors for one document class (style file), while being erroneous for another. So switching styles is not simply a matter of changing the \documentclass at the top, contrary to what one might expect.
I've had mixed luck with switching styles: when the styles are very similar things tend to work better…. Yeah my problem with LaTeX in contrast to plain TeX is that it's too hard to understand what's going on, and one gets all those package conflicts… I agree with you about the cross-references and bibliographies being the main benefit of LaTeX; I imagine one can get by with a more lightweight macro package like eplain or opmac, though I haven't tried them much. Ideally IMO one would do these things separately (and generate TeX files that have the cross references simply hard-coded) and not via the macro system, but haven't tried that much either.
If you are downvoted, it will probably be for chiming in for the purpose of complaining about downvoting instead of attempting to forward the conversation. There are plenty of constructive comments you could make containing the word "Libreoffice" that would be upvoted.
I've seen a few efforts to compile from LaTeX to epub but they've never worked for me. Having control over fonts would make epubs better but not all readers support the display of the original font.
Actually you can use org-mode without that much of a learning curve (at least in its basic form). Just pick an Emacs distribution (doom, spacemacs, ...) which come with pretty handy defaults, create an org-file and that's it. I use org-mode myself and didn't take the time to "learn" Emacs. This Google talk[0] was pretty handy to get familiar with org.
I bet if you write your TeX in Markdown and then run the whole thing through pandoc, you’ll get well-set math in your PDF. I’ve done this with org-mode.
I have observed my wife writing her PhD in M$ word, and indeed when editing either pictures or references the whole pages would shift, requiring post editing all subsequent sections.
When I was writing mine I used markdown with pandoc to compile to either LaTex or pdf. When we compared our processes we approached the ground that text rendering shall be done separately exactly for the reasons of editing, as well as reference handling.
Unfortunately, when she started she wasn’t exposed to those methods, nor by university; and the steep learning curve did not allow to switch in time. Those addressed points will much likely make the experience of writing on scientific topics much more pleasurable and efficient.
Scrivener is much better than Word for large documents. You can export a Scrivener-flavored file from Markdown to LaTeX without a problem. For that matter, you can also export to Word and directly to pdf. There's an import feature in Scrivener to bring in Word files, I'm not sure how it deals with changes made by others with respect to the original exported file.
Scrivener is a terrific first draft program.
And for the guy who asked, it does an excellent job of exporting to epub.
Just finished and submitted a 295 page Ph.D. dissertation written in LaTex. The only real downside, as I see it, is that «normal» people are used to giving feedback in Word documents.
* Positional only Arguments with flexible in between options (makes it really hard for me to remember things)
* Long. Long. Long compile times.
* Intermediate results can be stale and create errors that are not errors of the document at all.
* Errors that require multiple compile passes to go away
* Unlocateable errors (Dozens of box errors that are reported for the first or last document line)
* Bad error messages and error location in general (also due to the command structure)
* Multistage tools that need to run in certain order, be rerun and producing various errors if you do it wrong (especially bibliography related)
* Basic programming tasks like loops or coutners feel unnecessarily complex.
My problems with the programming and syntax side of latex might be attributed to me never getting the feeling of being familiar with the syntax (and not using the programmatic aspects much). Even though I write some documents in latex for 10 years now.
I never got familiar with alternatives either (like MS Word), though, because I assume it would be as much work as learning latex in the beginning.
Try editing a word document by editing the .docx file directly in an editor and come back to me.
Then try a nice interface for LaTeX like overleaf and also come back to me.
At the end of the day if you want to write a simple document, go to a word processor (I prefer Libreoffice, but Word is ok too if it's installed); if you want to write something more elaborate that you want to be in control of programmatically and have a template, go with LaTeX. The reverse can be done too, but typically it's unnecessary hours wasted for the wrong reasons.
What are the non-obvious factors here? Did the thought that "surely, there must be a better way to do this!" really not cross the minds of these interns? Of course, Word has a feature for this exact purpose.
Interns get paid by the hour. Work expands so as to consume the time available for its completion. Consider that after completing this task, there may be more work to do that is less pleasant, so stalling makes sense. Consider that this work, dull as it may seem, is actually somewhat enjoyable as a social activity.
A cost measure that isn't talked about is effort in collaboration. My partner works in the social sciences and when they write a paper, they send each other word documents with annotations and everybody works on it for a few days.
While our computer science group writes papers much more in parallel as everybody works in a section and we synchronize our progress via a git repository.
I believe Microsoft's Sharepoint could do the same thing, but none of us has Windows and the university does not have a sharepoint license.
In my case, we have to submit LaTeX-sources to journals anyways.
In my partner's case, their collaboration workflow heavily relies on annotations and comments. I don't know whether google Docs would work in that case.
Google docs works much better. Real-time collaboration is smooth. Somehow it’s much more performant than using word locally. You can add comments, assign tasks to others (also using comments and +<email address> To tag the assignee). You can also write suggested edits for someone else to approve. Annotations/references and figure numbering are there via plugins.
Share point/teams real-time collaboration also works, although not as well, but it has a fatal flaw: it’s too easy to download and work locally, so most users will do this and break the real-time collaboration aspect, without even realizing this was a feature in the first place, falling back on passing around v2_final.docs files that have to be merged.
In google docs, you can even use word docs natively now, though a few features are missing. You need a bit of discipline in the team to live with missing this or that tiny formatting detail, again to avoid breaking real-time collaboration.
158 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadThe level of pain experienced by LaTeX users in my experience is more often poor choices made by the users who create unnecessary complexity. Avoid that, and it's a pretty reasonable model to work in.
Keep the same core design of compiled source code files, but there are many things that don't make any sense. As just one example having to use the `\makeatletter` / `\makeatother` hack to change the visibility of macros seems completely insane to me when we have had languages with fine-grained visibility control for decades. This is one of the many things that make using many packages together needlessly hard.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
MS word is also perfectly usable, as long as you don't try to do anything weird (as the example in the article illustrates!).
For me, the ideal solution would be something WordPerfect but with ability to type LaTeX equations.
I want to be able to manipulate the "code" of the document but with a nice UI with real-time preview that helps me placing and formatting figures, text boxes for pseudo-code etc.
Back in 1984 I wrote a small WYSIWYG editor at PARC that outputted primitive LaTex. Fortunately LaTeX was quite early stage and that little project went nowhere. But one of the lessons was that semantic markup was much easier to do by just typing rather than trying to infer it context, while -driven changes meant people usually just changed font and size and erased the semantic anyway. This has been borne out by Word.
Edit: added bit starting “But one of...” to explain my comment
Edit: changed parent → grandparent
> One of the great things about Latex (or raw tex) is that you can simply type it into a buffer.
and pointing out it also applies to HTML.
More usable for you perhaps, but certainly not for me.
If you were to write something like HTML, how would you do so in a manner that didn't involve raw text? Sure it might be [emph shown] in a marked up way, but then doesn't your LaTeX editor do this?
And if your editor does this, how can you be sure that the new markup language for documents are not, in fact, superior in readability and expressiveness to LaTeX?
I mean, the made up formatting I tried to show in this comment is more readable and extendable than LaTeX (in my eyes, anyway), but it is still raw text.
Html wasn’t mentioned in the article but it is ok. I find latex easier and the result more attractive.
My editor doesn’t do any highlighting or anything like that. It does have syntax-dependent motion commands, which work better with LT than html.
\chapter{Animals}
instead of
== Animals
or should that be:
=== Animals
I think an xml or html like approach is better:
<chapter>Animals</chapter>
One of the big issue is modal states for structure or styling.
I've often found trouble in latex because you are in some state that you didn't expect and somehow have to get out of.
Nested XML would hopefully be more obvious about what your state is.
Docbook probably got this right, but it was too verbose for most.
But then surely the h1 document title should be above that, which would be "=" (1), so a chapter is below at "==" (2)?
\part apparently is -1 in latex, which would be seem to be odd.
But document title isn't part of the latex sectioning hierarchy...
Given that there is a document title, part and chapter, chapter could maybe "===" (3) or maybe "==" (2) if we're not using parts or we don't consider the document title.
I think anyway?
It's unfortunate that the creators of latex did not follow the HTML heading rules better. (despite latex pre-dating html of course)
:-)
- Can be opened on every device
- Content can be embedded in base64, so you only have to share one file
- Dynamic layout, so it looks nice even on phones
- Searchable, standardized XML structure
- Great customizability through CSS and optionally JS
- Can be written in markdown
- Basic support for page breaks, if you really must print the document (IA Writer already has some HTML-Templates meant for printing.)
The only downside I can think of, is that you can't lock the document to prevent edits.
However, conventions are what keeps PDF alive. Until the academic world realizes that they can do better than Latex, we're stuck.
However, this is a matter of personal opinion and I am certain that nobody knows how many people prefer PDF and how many prefer HTML.
I strongly prefer PDF for any non-ephemeral content that I might need to read twice or more times, so I hate anyone who forces me to read an HTML user manual or scientific paper, instead of providing PDF documents for them.
Even if HTML can be opened on every device, it also looks different on every device and it looks bad on those that are different from the one used by the developer (unless the HTML pages have been carefully designed to look good on various devices, which seldom happens).
Even on a small smartphone screen, I prefer a good PDF viewer with a good user interface that makes it easy to zoom & pan, instead of the feeble attempts of the Web browsers to reformat the text, which make very difficult the navigation through complex technical documents.
"Print" support is horrible for HTML. Modern Web pages, which use a lot of JS, are almost always mutilated when you use the "Print" command in both Chrome and Firefox, even if they display the pages correctly outside the "Print" mode.
- On any device as long as it runs a browser
- You can write TeX documents as a single file with ease
- Phones are not designed for reading, so dynamic layout or not, it will still be inferior to finely typeset document
- With care so can be TeX; carelessly written HTML docs will be just as bad as anything else
- CSS is a pretty poor layout tool; typographically speaking, CSS is very subpar to TeX's capabilities, using JS... well how much better is it than just using macros in TeX/LaTeX?
- markdown is fine for simple stuff but for highly complicated documents involving lots of generated tables, lists, and mathematics it is almost like having no tool at all;
- but many people DO like printed documents (I rarely can stand reading anything but basic technical stuff on screen, say language reference is fine but anything that requires thinking, has to be printed);
TeX is not locked to pdf in any way (it is not even it's native format). HTML's support for formulas is primitive (the only decent tools available are ... based on TeX). Academic world is not entirely uniform either but while I do think LaTeX is not ideal (TeX is though), I simply shudder when I think about Word or any MS or Adobe products.
I went so far as to write a script that downloads the Tex source of a paper from arxiv, changes up the paper size to match my phone screen, and recompiles the paper. It’s ok for text-heavy documents, but doesn’t work well for most figures. And most of my field does not post preprints (or use LaTeX at all).
For me the ideal solution would be something like org mode -> html output. I think the main gap that isn’t really addressed by any tool I’ve seen is reference management
Personally, I find my phone to be my favorite medium to read prose on, not inferior to anything – including printed paper, which I never use if I can help it. It works for books and most webpages, but PDFs are a disaster.
My second preference is my laptop. Its screen is big enough to make reading PDFs an acceptable experience, but not a great one. When viewing at an optimal zoom level for me, there's almost enough vertical space to fit an entire normally-sized page… but not quite. Which means I have to scroll. In the common case that the paper has two columns, I have to scroll down to read the bottom left of the page, then back up to read the top right, then back down to read the bottom right.
Oh, and it's always great hunting for the figures in a paper, because of course they have to be nicely lined up in a corner of a page, even if that leaves them far from the text that references them. It's a compromise that makes total sense in print, but feels silly on a screen.
So TeX's output is good in print but awkward on a screen. (It may not be limited to PDF, but I'm pretty sure all its output formats assume a fixed page size.) Meanwhile, HTML is good on a screen, but I agree that it's awkward in print.
What we need is a format that's good at both, and that doesn't currently exist.
If you are creating pdf's, you are not limited to portrait/a4/letter, you can specify landscape/size of your laptop screen and use newspaper columns.
> By recovering HTML's original parsing rules from HTML5's specification text, we conclude that HTML5's parsing rules are represented adequately, and more succinctly, since avoiding redundantly specifying p-terminating elements.
> This interpretation is also supported by the fact that for the HTML5.1 specification update (vs. HTML5), the new details, figcaption, figure and menu elements (which are flow-only elements) but not the new picture element (which can also be used in phrasing content) have been added to the set of p-terminating elements.
All in all, HTML doesn't appear to be a rational, recommendable authoring format for any non-trivial writing project. After more than 30 years, it's still SGML that has all the power needed: can handle markdown and other custom Wiki syntax, can deal with and produce any HTML, has stylesheets and type-safe text macro expansion and templating. For the LISP lovers on HN, there's even the OpenJade project (dormant since about 2008 or so) for using Scheme-based DSSSL with SGML.
[1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html
A blast from the past. Waw, FOP is even still maintained: "Apache™ FOP version 2.5 was released on 13 May 2020." https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/status.html
Microsoft Word has automatic numbering. Just to be sure, I opened Word, and entered a numbered list. When I inserted a new numbered item, it automatically renumbered the list. Also, converting from a numbered list to bullet points is as simple as selecting the list and clicking the bullets icon instead of the numbered list icon.
This opening anecdote makes me think the author is completely unfamiliar with Word, and is strawmanning it.
Regardless, Bernstein does in fact address this criticism in the note added yesterday. Yes, it has automatic list numbering, but in order to achieve the desired formatting, the users had, instead of altering the formatting appropriately, removed this automatic numbering, because Microsoft Word doesn't make these sorts of distinctions clear and explicit.
You can get into much worse situations than this once you leave the "happy path" in LaTeX.
If we want to compare tools, we should not compare expert users of one tool with novices of another tool.
That would explain it :-)
But I guess it’s not easy to save work in latex when in macro mode?
LaTeX seems much more predictable. I have a file with my custom commands and styles that I `\input` and use always use consistent style. Nothing too crazy. But I also never try to do anything too crazy in Word, either.
2. From the article:
> Note added 2020.12.07: ... Each item in the list looked like a flush-left paragraph, like the paragraphs in this blog post, adjacent to the left margin.
They were numbering paragraphs, not line items, and lines that wrapped were supposed to be left-justified. I don't think this is a strawman.
3. MS Word would have a fit with skipping a number before "They" in the sentence above, and assigning number 3 and not 1 to this paragraph.
4. There are other cases when you need to separately label Article 1/Section A/Clause I etc. in a hierarchy; the numbered list tabulation and hopefully semantic Heading 1/Heading 2/Heading 3 styles and tables of contents in Word can handle this for your use case, but be prepared for frustration if you want something a little different than what the UI is designed to help you build.
Word allows you to adjust the indentation on numbered lists so that the text in a paragraph is flush with the left margin. In Word 365 there are at least two ways to do this:
1. View -> Show -> [check Ruler] -> [Adjust the indentation on the ruler]
2. Layout -> Paragraph -> [click lower right arrow] Paragraph Settings -> Indentation -> change Special from (hanging) to (none), or change the "By:" value to 0
So the author's motivating example doesn't seem to be a particularly fair criticism of Word.
For me, Word and LaTeX are on par. Styles, referencing, formula, macros, auto-layout are possible in both. However real-world use is different because Word is the lowest common denominator and thus mostly only the basic features actually get used. Because everybody experienced the horror of automatic features at least once.
In using Word with long documents, I'm reminded of pilots' early criticism of Airbus software, "What's it doing now?"
"Geeks that have read 2000 man pages about LaTex and have never bothered to browse Word docs complain about missing feature in Word that is actually in Word since the last millenium" :-))
I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side.
Word and LaTeX not comparable tools and they're not designed for the same job. Comparing them makes as much sense as comparing a bicycle with a skateboard.
I wrote a ~200 page (digital) textbook on 3d Modeling using Word.
Word is incredibly customizable, I had hotkeys setup to do everything I wanted, figures and diagrams manages themselves rather well, and I was easily able to get into a state of flow using Word.
Now it took several days to get Word that customized, but having seen what it can do, I will not call it mediocre.
However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise.
Should be noted I wasn't doing any typesetting or any such thing, just writing the document, I understand that beyond just writing, LaTeX is a far superior tool.
But that is now, and the number of times I've been burned in the past and watched other people being burned, and the distress it is caused those who just want to get their job done and the time wasted; those memories fade slowly.
My hot Word tip is to use Styles. My other hot Word tip is to use cross-references. If you type "See Figure 3-1" in full, you're doing it wrong.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please fix a) the unreadable text in the Styles drop-down selection list in dark mode and b) stop asking my if the large amount of data I put on the clipboard should be available to other apps when I exit Word. With SSDs, this anachronism takes me far longer to read and click No to vs. just saving the damn clipboard content without asking me.
Wow. That was my hot tip for Word 1.0 too. I felt they did a rather too good job of hiding them subsequently.
This works great with your own document or small experienced group. But let any "normal" person do any changes... and you're back to local modifications. And is actually hard to figure out what was done ad-hoc and what via styles.
Done.
We enforce this and it makes it so much easier for everybody. We also enforce that no one is allowed to mess with the style definitions once they are fixed for the specific project.
It is the same as if one is using code formatting rules and enforces them by configuration of linting tools.
Do some people complain, because they cannot do their personal pet peeve? Sure. Do I care in terms of the greater good for the project or the team? Only in so far as I learn not to want said people in my projects/teams.
Do some people point out specific and relevant flaws in the designe/code/style rules? Sure. Do they count? Hell yes. I love these people in my teams/projects. They know how to understand systems, think systematically and also how to communicate relevant criticism in a productive way.
Feature request: some sort of ML in Word that detects when someone is using spaces to line text up between lines, stops them, and pops up a tutorial on using the ruler.
You can also do a search for double spaces.
It's not that they can't easily mess up. Instead there's a higher barrier to do that - once you're past it, you have more understanding of the system.
Out of curiosity how large were these documents, and were they completely text or did they contain a fair number of images?
I'm asking since I once ran into a situation with a long and image-filled Word document (150 ish pages, maybe 50 high res images) where there was a noticeable lag when typing and saving would take 30s.
Hope that is useful information for you.
This points to the real criticism of Word: that its internal representation of text is quite different to its appearance (i.e. WYSIWYG does not imply WYSIWYM) and if you make even a little use of its advanced features and reedit, you will quite likely get a document that behaves perversely. I have quite often seen Word users give up on reformatting a section, cut and paste it into another application and then cut and paste-back-without-styling so that they can reformat from scratch.
The point I was making is that the more of Word's advanced features you use, the more of these kinds of mismatch you risk encountering.
That is the one feature of Word that drives me nuts as a LaTeX and markdown user. I'm sure there must be a setting to change it somewhere, though. Right?
A comparison of FrameMaker and Latex would be a more interesting exercise, I think.
The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint.
Most of the extra features I used only required a single command in the preamble to get everything to work out-of-the-box. And I mean everything.
> In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box.
...except when it does not. I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason, or to get images to play nice with their captions so that they break in the same page.
shrug I can also say "the only issue you're referring to is discoverability of the advanced features of Word".
"I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason,"
You literally right-click on the "Heading 1" style in a brand new Word document, select "Modify" (as in "modify this style", quite obvious), under "Format" click on "Numbering" and select one of several numbering styles. I spend more time looking up how to do Markdown numbered headings markup than that - and that's not a complaint, I don't spend a lot of time on that at all.
Look, I dislike non-semantic markup too. But all the whining about how if only those Word using idiots would just switch to Latex and all would be well in the world is getting old, and not only that, it's just wrong. Yes it's easy to make a pdf that looks like the default ugly Latex style, but beyond that, it's a massive time sink for even the tiniest modifications. All of these tools suck, some just suck a bit less for specific jobs than others. Claiming that Latex is 'superior' to Word is like saying that a tractor is superior to a bicycle because you can't pull a plow with a bicycle. I mean, sure, that's true - but there are many more criteria for judging modes of transport, just as there are multiple for document preparation systems, and Word wins on some criteria and Latex on others.
Most students use Word while the exceptional ones have already embraced LaTeX.
(IIRC the automatic backup was readable, and I recovered most of the work from there. But one of the equations was cursed, and I had to delete and rewrite it. (I probably had a handmade backup, just in case, but it was a few hours old.))
It is typically because they have the wrong mental model of how image placement should work. Floats are floating for a reason.
You should guess again.
With LaTeX the biggest problem with images is seeig them reflow in a place you wasn't expecting because you did not paid attention to what you actually did.
With Word, you even have to fight it to not put images and their image captions on separate pages.
More importantly, with LaTeX the worst you get with images is them looking nice and neat in some other part of the text, maybe at the end of a section or with a single paragraph between them. With Word it's on par for the course to get your whole doc screwed up just because the image reflowed to the next page.
You keep saying this, and this has simply not been true since Word 2007. You keep captions on the same page as their respective pictures using the same method you keep all lines of a paragraph on the same page: Keep with Next in Paragraph options. If a caption (or picture) still flows onto the next page, that is because it simply won't fit into the page without resizing the picture or changing the page margins.
JS 1 - Haskell 0
This is only really relevant if you're generating Word documents programatically from other data sources (it's very easy to do this with the MS-provided tools which can auto-generate code-behind for programs that need to make documents like this), but it's entirely possible to end up with invalid OOXML that means the document doesn't load.
Some are recoverable, some aren't.
It's more or less a cleaned up version of the language with a slightly different philosophy behind its macros.
while latex needs plugins for many extra features from all kinds of sources, and these plugins sometimes fight between themselves, context is more like bsd or django: comes with batteries included and i found it a much nicer experience.
"LaTeX users being more satisfied than Microsoft Word users and (2) KN claiming that Microsoft Word is more efficient"
There is no conflict in this statement, despite the author's claim. People who walk to work (for reasonable distances) will also tend to feel better, even though it took them longer.
Efficiency and satisfaction are different things. One is subjective ("how do you feel?"), the other objective (amount of work done per time). You are free to assign any relative value you like to these objectives, neither one is objectively "more important" than the other in all cases.
But entirely denying a measurable result while being offended by the idea that, maybe, the measurable satisfaction LaTeX gives you could also, theoretically, possibly, cloud your judgement, is silly. It's literally a textbook example of a cognitive bias!
I suspect the root cause here may be how much the tech scene loves to pretend to be "objective" / "neutral" / "scientific". If people were to consider the idea that they are just bundles of emotions, like everyone else, and, most importantly that there's nothing wrong with that, it would vastly improve some parts of the discourse.
You chose LaTeX because (a) you prefer to spend an hour with a keyboard to spending 30 min with a mouse, because (b) it's part of the identity you've chosen for yourself, because (c) it gives your work that cool Bell Labs vibe, because (d) your peers would judge you, because (e) your peers chose it for you, because (e) you didn't invest a month into learning it to abandon it, because (f) you built this really cool continuous integration pipeline from your lab to Nature, or because (g) you're the type of person that noticed I used (e) twice, and those people just tend towards LaTeX.
Some of these are emotional reasons. That doesn't mean they are invalid! You don't need to rationalise them. Be irrational and proud of it–it's been cool among a majority of numbers for a long time.
Efficiency isn’t a measure of how long a task takes, it’s about how much additional work is performed relative to the optimal path. Waking vs driving to work is an interesting example because it depends on what you count as work when you frame the problem. Driving requires your body to less work, but walking costs less energy overall because you don’t have to accelerate and move a heavy vehicle.
I prefer LaTeX (specifically via org mode) because it feels like there is less cognitive overhead to me. References are magical (especially with org-ref), I don’t have to fight with the layout algorithm to keep my train of thought as i move my cursor around and edit text, emacs keybindings....
This is all in tension with collaborative writing, since most people in my field don’t use LaTeX or org mode. Here I prefer GDocs to Word in large part because at least my browser understands some basic emacs keybindings.
If you wanted your work to have a Bell Labs vibe, wouldn't you use troff?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The Abstract :
"The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. 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. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors."
Really? The whole point of using LaTeX is that there would be style files and you never would need to take the time to format anything.
It takes a significant amount of work to get rid of those for me and I usually do not fix all of them in the end, because some minor ones are more work than they are worth.
I do a lot of work in a myriad of vendor-provided software with various degrees of quality for industrial control systems. I'm always grateful when they (1) don't mess with OS-provided text entry commands like tab stops to move between fields, F2 to start editing, enter or shift-enter to accept, copy paste, etc. and (2) provide a plain-text import-export utility. Literally today, I was faced with the barely unusual requirement to add a total of 1200 logic elements among 5 sets of 20 very similar lines of ladder logic to a program , I was grateful for the ability to do those 5 basic rungs once, export that section of logic, and run some regexes to generate all 100 rungs instead of being stuck using the mouse and clicking the add contact icon, scrolling to select the tag in the list, clicking the add coil icon, and scrolling to its tag, ad nauseam. A task that would have taken hours instead took just a couple minutes!
However, I have observed that I feel better about these productivity wins and worse about some pragmatic drudge work than an objective analysis from the clock actually supports. Instead of boasting about the 'big win' on HN, had I been forced to spend half a day entering that logic manually, I would probably have complained about the vendor's awful UI for weeks, denigrating their hardware at the next project's quote phase. Realistically, though, it wouldn't have taken that much effort to do it manually. Similarly, I have no doubt that when trying to do something 4 times, it's often faster to just do it manually all 4 times, rather than copy-paste, keyboard navigation, find-replace, and edit machinations to make that happen.
[1]: https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/
Regardless, it should go right next to https://xkcd.com/1319/, though that may be less helpful as a reference and instead induce an existential crisis...
The point of this blog post here (the OP) is just that the study by Knauff and Nejasmic is really awful, for the reasons it mentions: studies the wrong metric, etc. (Of course typing "see [41]" would be more efficient than typing "see \cite{multiplication-survey}" for instance.) Far from the authors' claim of a “highly realistic working conditions”.
(Also this blog post is titled “part 1” so I imagine there will be future blog posts either on this specific topic, or on measuring the wrong metric, in general?)
Edit: Some of the comments here seemed odd to me, until I noticed that this HN submission is titled “Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration [sic]: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex [sic]”, while the actual blog post is titled “Optimizing for the wrong metric, part 1: Microsoft Word” and has the subtitle “Review of "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" by Knauff and Nejasmic.” From the HN submission title, I can imagine that before clicking one may expect the link to contain a measurement or comparison, rather than a review of some paper. Titles of articles are already (in general) a poor indicator of their contents, but please don't editorialize titles to make them less representative!
> Even using LaTeX, which does not make the final formatting very easy, I usually spend less than two minutes per page doing the final formatting to produce camera-ready output
and less a criticism regarding the superiority of logical (i.e. semantic) document editing systems over visual (WYSIWYG) editors. Lamport even says[2]
> I know of no purely logical system that is currently available. Systems like Scribe and LaTeX permit the user to describe the visual appearance as well as the logical structure of the document—for example, by inserting a command to add a quarter-inch vertical space. The need to provide the user with such commands is a symptom of the deficiencies of these systems.
[1] Leslie Lamport, "Document Production: Visual or Logical?", page 6, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2016/1...
[2] supra, page 2
I find it disingenuous of Bernstein to use the existence of a broken style as if it were a counterexample to Lamport’s points. This is not what I would call a “stinging criticism”.
I'm not sure why you call the style broken: the final result looks fine, and DJB didn't have to fix any errors in the style itself, only in his document. (Also, the author of the style is a translator and co-author of IMO the best introductory book on TeX—comes highly recommended by Hans Hagen in the ConTeXt manual too, as “the book that turns every beginner into an expert”—though of course LaTeX conventions are a different beast and it's possible that the expertise doesn't carry over.)
Rather, my experience is that for any nontrivial document, simply changing the LaTeX style (\documentclass) from one to another (like amsart to msripub here, or just one journal's house style to another independent one) is unlikely to be enough; the amount of work required is likely to be much more than the indicated “two minutes”.
So what that story points out is that one of the promises of LaTeX (that particular one, of being able to change styles easily) doesn't hold up too well in practice (not many people try it), and the fact that this page starkly shows the typical results one would get on trying is what makes it sting IMO. Or at least so I imagine (I'm not much of a LaTeX fan, more of a plain TeX one).
Personally, I’ve had much better luck when switching styles. I think, though, that plain TeX is greatly underused, especially as, when there are problems, they are often conflicts among LaTeX packages. What do you do about cross references and bibliographies? (That’s the selling point of LaTeX for me, not the formatting stuff.)
I've had mixed luck with switching styles: when the styles are very similar things tend to work better…. Yeah my problem with LaTeX in contrast to plain TeX is that it's too hard to understand what's going on, and one gets all those package conflicts… I agree with you about the cross-references and bibliographies being the main benefit of LaTeX; I imagine one can get by with a more lightweight macro package like eplain or opmac, though I haven't tried them much. Ideally IMO one would do these things separately (and generate TeX files that have the cross references simply hard-coded) and not via the macro system, but haven't tried that much either.
Ok, thanks, bye.
Conducting a new scientific study would have been more interesting.
For math, best to stay in LaTeX because of the need to produce equations.
For everything else:
Markdown with a few additions (centering support, page break support) => html = pdf or Markdown => LaTeX
4.
1.
3.
5.
If the language does not support this case (Markdown) then it's useless.
------
> 1. Bla bla
Yes, bla
> 2. Blubb bar
No, foo bar.
------
Markdown turns the 2 into a 1.
0: youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM
I wrote my master thesis with this combo, but wrestling with images positions made me turn back to pure Latex.
Scrivener is a terrific first draft program.
And for the guy who asked, it does an excellent job of exporting to epub.
My personal gripes with latex (or downsides):
* Positional only Arguments with flexible in between options (makes it really hard for me to remember things)
* Long. Long. Long compile times.
* Intermediate results can be stale and create errors that are not errors of the document at all.
* Errors that require multiple compile passes to go away
* Unlocateable errors (Dozens of box errors that are reported for the first or last document line)
* Bad error messages and error location in general (also due to the command structure)
* Multistage tools that need to run in certain order, be rerun and producing various errors if you do it wrong (especially bibliography related)
* Basic programming tasks like loops or coutners feel unnecessarily complex.
My problems with the programming and syntax side of latex might be attributed to me never getting the feeling of being familiar with the syntax (and not using the programmatic aspects much). Even though I write some documents in latex for 10 years now.
I never got familiar with alternatives either (like MS Word), though, because I assume it would be as much work as learning latex in the beginning.
And of course there’s the presentation of equations and high quality vector graphics, Word is very poor in that regard.
Try editing a word document by editing the .docx file directly in an editor and come back to me.
Then try a nice interface for LaTeX like overleaf and also come back to me.
At the end of the day if you want to write a simple document, go to a word processor (I prefer Libreoffice, but Word is ok too if it's installed); if you want to write something more elaborate that you want to be in control of programmatically and have a template, go with LaTeX. The reverse can be done too, but typically it's unnecessary hours wasted for the wrong reasons.
What are the non-obvious factors here? Did the thought that "surely, there must be a better way to do this!" really not cross the minds of these interns? Of course, Word has a feature for this exact purpose.
Interns get paid by the hour. Work expands so as to consume the time available for its completion. Consider that after completing this task, there may be more work to do that is less pleasant, so stalling makes sense. Consider that this work, dull as it may seem, is actually somewhat enjoyable as a social activity.
While our computer science group writes papers much more in parallel as everybody works in a section and we synchronize our progress via a git repository.
I believe Microsoft's Sharepoint could do the same thing, but none of us has Windows and the university does not have a sharepoint license.
In my partner's case, their collaboration workflow heavily relies on annotations and comments. I don't know whether google Docs would work in that case.
Share point/teams real-time collaboration also works, although not as well, but it has a fatal flaw: it’s too easy to download and work locally, so most users will do this and break the real-time collaboration aspect, without even realizing this was a feature in the first place, falling back on passing around v2_final.docs files that have to be merged.
In google docs, you can even use word docs natively now, though a few features are missing. You need a bit of discipline in the team to live with missing this or that tiny formatting detail, again to avoid breaking real-time collaboration.