Maybe I use Word wrong, but I always hated how it was really easy to screw up formatting and spacing by accident. As well, changing some line spacing consistently across the document was a pain (e.g. list spacing).
With LaTeX I find I make a lot less accidental mistakes. If something goes wrong, I know exactly what caused it (just look at my changes!)
The ability to effectively diff and version control a LaTeX (or Markdown, or reStructuredText, etc) file is, more than anything else, what keeps me away from word processors for anything but throwaway document sketches. Word and similar can do "track changes", but it is extremely clunky by comparison.
You are using Word wrong (like everybody else). Don't manually change the font sizes on anything, instead give the text the correct style (title, subtitle, paragraph, etc) and then change that style to be what you want.
One of the benefits of LaTeX is that it practically forces you to do this.
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{letter}
\signature{the user}
\address{the user\\right here}
\begin{letter}{Receiver\\somewhere over the rainbow}
Bla bla bla
...
Not very different and you can ensure your letters look great.
I like latex and use it almost exclusively for non-collaborative stuff. I've grown to despise word, although it is easy to make the argument that it's quicker for throwing up a short document.
My main gripe with latex is debugging. Writing in a latex will go all fast and productive, until I forget something trivial that ends up taking an hour to find because of cryptic error message during compile.
Last, I think it was a & symbol in text that I forgot to escape. Tex was throwing an error about unmatched {, with a line number way later than my ampersand. Gah, went crazy looking at my file in vim and being certain everything was matched.
Yeah, I rather love LaTeX too, but debugging is probably its biggest weakness. Especially the types of errors where the error message indicates an error in a line after where the error actually is, because of how the parser works. Those take me forever to find.
It doesn't happen to me as much anymore, I've added a few vim plugins that help a lot (like rainbow parenthesis).
(My take on the short version: Of course it's very difficult to use LaTeX to reproduce a document's specific formatting. That's not what LaTeX is for. On the other hand, if you want to type a bunch of text with semantic labels (title, section, subsection, etc.) and use a journal-provided style file to format that text in precisely that journal's style, LaTeX is really, really easy.)
> On the other hand, if you want to type a bunch of text with semantic labels (title, section, subsection, etc.) and use a journal-provided style file to format that text in precisely that journal's style, LaTeX is really, really easy.)
Note that this is also really, really easy in Word.
Even including things like floating figure placement? I'll admit, I haven't kept up with all the features along these lines that Word provides these days: I know it's been catching up.
(In fact, I'm curious to know: do most folks using Word these days actually use the semantic elements like "title" and "heading 2"? Or is it still common for people to just hit "bold" and enlarge the font size?)
Floating figure placement has been possible for ages, but with the caveat that the figure has to be anchored to a particular paragraph and Word makes sure that the anchored paragraph and the figure appear on the same page, sometimes moving both the paragraph and the figure on the next page, e.g.
That's about the only annoyance. Not that LaTeX is without fault here either, oftentimes giving up on figure placement (even with »here«) and putting them at the end of the section.
Math typesetting has been possible since 2007 in an integrated form (whereas the old formula editor was just an embedded OLE object, which you couldn't style, and which often didn't match the surrounding text in size and font). The syntax is similar to LaTeX, although (in my opinion) easier and faster to type because of a few syntactic niceties (see UTN #28).
And if you wanted automatic ToC generation your option has always (back at least several versions and two or three decades) been to use the proper styles Heading 1–9. Generally, if you want to keep your sanity you should be using styles everywhere and always. I don't use physical formatting at all. The benefits of that are the same as in LaTeX: You can change styles at will without going through all of your document and it's far easier to achieve a consistent look of the document.
But yes, every now and then I see people who approach »I want to make this a heading« as »I need to make this bold and larger«. I'm not sure how they are thinking (especially since Word since 2007 made styles much more prominent than the physical formatting), but there are such people. LaTeX's advantage here is that it needs education to use at all, which means that's the point where one can basically say »There are no ways of making things bold, only ways of emphasising more, which may be rendered as bold«. Word can and will be used without training and the results are exactly what you'd expect in that case.
I hate latex - I am not sure how much I will be down-voted on the internet but in the academic world saying those words will you give you cold harsh looks.
I have switched to using HTML/CSS for creating my docs. It works !. It took a while to set it up but I love using it. If similar effort was put into making HTML useable for academic work, we would have been in travelling in interstellar space !
Anyway use the tool that your heart wants.
PS : The writer of Games of Thrones uses terminals from the 1960s ! So I don't think these questions matter.
The only problem is matrix notation and latex macros.
I been trying in my free time playing with parsers like peg.js to find a way to create a robust system. but My knowledge in parsers is limited as an engineering student.
I want to like KaTeX so much, but without `\begin{cases}` or `\begin{align}`, it just can't typeset some of the equations I use. I'll keep an eye on it though. Maybe they'll implement those things some day.
I've experimented with WeasyPrint[0], which does a really good job (in my opinion) of making HTML and CSS work for print. I've even used it to to generate a good-sized parallel-text book, and it did a fine job — as good as I'd expect from any tool.
LaTeX has a bunch of benefits to it, one of those is its output quality. I don't how your system can equal that unless you are going to write your own render system.
Also GoTs is years behind its schedule, but I wouldn't hold that up as evidence of anything.
People also write books by hand, and with a typewriter. (And as seanmcdirmid pointed out, 1980s, not 1960s; and it's not a terminal but a personal computer.)
The thing is, book publishers have people who will re-typeset a manuscript. Especially if written by a best selling author whose next books will sell in the millions.
By comparison, the academic press shifts most of that work on the authors. Academic authors don't get paid to write content and sometimes have to pay, don't get paid for typesetting, don't get paid for peer reviews, etc. (And Elsevier, one of the big academic presses, had a profit margin of 36% in 2010.)
If your heart wants to get published in an academic journal, then you may end up using a different tool than if your heart wants to publish on the web, or wants to publish a best-selling novel. By analogy, if my heart is set on doing Python programming, I won't be doing much microcontroller work. If my heart is set on optimizing the performance of dense linear solvers, then I likely won't do it in Python.
Essentially, the test is too limited for its purposes.
A huge advantage for LaTeX is the ability to copy and paste faithfully and modify easily. This is how novices learn. In Word, if you look at an example of something awesome, it tells you nothing on how to make it. With TeX, it is self-documenting on how to produce it and how to modify it.
Also, text tools can help greatly. One can easily integrate data sources piping text into these documents, handling tabular issues.
But the key is maintenance. If you need to make major changes, text documents are much easier to manage. TeX is used for documents that someone cares about, not some one-off letter to be written and forgotten. Though I would still prefer to use TeX even in that case, but I concede that that's just me.
Not only is the test limited, it is entirely irrelevant. A major advantage of (La)TeX is that the journal has a good LaTeX template in its Instructions for Authors, and you almost don't have to think about formatting. Certainly not about formatting references. These guys come across as high school students criticising Apple for having a flawed product design approach. The fact that they've never heard of version control systems says it all.
I would like to propose a similar test, much more relevant to what scientists do in their jobs, where LaTeX would win hands down:
Your paper was rejected from Journal A. You now want to submit it to Journal B. Your task is to convert the manuscript ao that it fits the Instructions for Authors for Journal B.
So it's 2015 and obviously LaTeX is still as relevant as it ever was - but is there a better, nicer way for someone to make an introduce into the world of LaTeX?
Has anyone used texmaker [1]? It looks like it would be good for beginners to the language, though clunky?
For beginners or people who don't know / don't want to learn Latex, it's great. It's a bit more clunky if you're more of a latex "power-user" and want to customise stuff, but still possible, though a regular latex editor might be a better choice in that case.
I started with MiKTeX [1], an all-in-one package including TeXworks. Even tough it's a nice software-package to start with, I would (indeed) recommend using Texmaker instead of TeXworks. It packs more features, but is nonetheless not very complicated.
I started out with LyX, but as soon you need to do something out of the ordinary it becomes difficult, and you have no idea why things behave the way they do. So I'd rather shave off that experience and start dig in to LaTeX. Can't recommend http://www.sharelatex.com enough, it's great. Start with the simplest template and go from there.
Well, I learnt a lot about LaTeX while using it for writing my undergradute thesis.
As much I admire LaTeX for its power/customizability, for typical non-tech/business docs I prefer Lyx nowadays. Feels like using MS Word, but powered by LaTeX :p
There are a couple of alternatives that I find quite useful.
For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) gives good results for very little effort.
For most things, I use Org-Mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org/), which is an absolute joy to use. It outputs via Latex, and if you want a bit of extra customization you can include Latex statements verbatim. Org-Mode also works as a literate programming environment if you want to include and run bits of code, include parts of other files, or if you want to generate charts or diagrams.
Edit: I should also mention that org-mode has a great table editor.
I would recommend using one of the collaborative online editors that reduce the learning burden of compilation, versioning, and package management while providing WYSIWYG:
What about bookmarks? Styles? Table of contents? Bibliographies? Proper hyphenation? Adding images? Adding captions to images? Multiple columns? Almost all academic papers have at least some of the above in them, why ignore them?
I completely agree with the current top comment; this study is much too limited to be of any use in real life.
How would you suggest an objective comparison should be done? People who are familiar with one are unlikely to be equally familiar with the other to be able to compare the packages rather than comparing their own skills, and anyone unfamiliar with the packages will not progress far enough to test the features you mention.
I don't see how, perhaps you could explain further. Both packages are powerful, both packages have many features, both packages require time to acquire fluency and productiveness. Experience suggests that people will pick one and stick with it, making it impossible to measure the difference in productivity.
Writers from academia are effectively forced to use LaTeX. Writers who just start writing will use Word, because that's what's on Windows machines, and that's what they immediately have to hand. Besides, why should they know of the existence of other options?
They don't. Word will remain "popular" because even though everyone I know who uses it "in anger" hates it, nevertheless, people don't know of any effective alternatives. Those who use LaTeX will continue to revel in the power of it, and shrug about how many people are hamstrung by Word.
I, for one, would love to see a genuine and informative comparison. This paper is the closest I've seen, and while many people sneer at it, no real alternatives have been offered.
I sometimes find LaTeX too verbose. And sometimes it's very tricky to do seemingly trivial things.
For web development, HTML, CSS, Javascript can be written directly, or generated by some other template language like haml, slim, coffeescript, sass, stylus, etc.
I believe the same applies to TeX. Although AFAIK there aren't template languages targeting TeX, treating TeX as "dynamic HTML" or just use your favorite language to generate TeX sometimes turns out to be much cleaner and more maintainable code. The generated TeX is not human-read friendly, but just works.
It's also a lot easier to get started with LaTeX than it used to be -- e.g. with cloud-based compilers such as Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com) which remove the need to get everything installed and working locally before you can try it out.
(Note: I'm one of the co-founders of Overleaf, so any feedback is appreciated, thanks. My co-founder has also put together this free introductory course for anyone that's looking to give LaTeX a try: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/learn/free-online-introductio...)
Being a programmer, and having used both, neither exclusively, I think I offer an unbiased viewpoint.
LaTeX makes me feel like I'm in control of my document. I've had word processors do really weird things that I could never explain. In LaTeX, I can always get an explanation.
Thanks to programs like LyX, http://www.lyx.org/, one can have the power of both understanding the underlying and the high level startup speed of WYSIWYG{M}, and one doesn't need to make a billion trips to TeX StackExchange.
If you need a quick throwaway document that doesn't need to be maintained, and you don't care if it looks professionally typeset, Word is ideal, just type (although arguably LyX offers the same).
If you need a document that will receive a lot of scrutiny, and you're going to maintain it again and again (like a resume, CV, business card (yeah, I did it), academic paper, etc...) you should go with LaTeX. Get the look right, and don't worry about it any more.
We use HTML for web, which is very public and maintained. We need a markup language for printed text that has the same expectations. LaTeX is that.
I've been forced to use latex (academia), and I don't really like it. A few reasons:
Automatic figure placement sounds good in theory, but in practice you have to manually fix everything up.
pdflatex && pdflatex && bibtex && pdflatex
Slow buildspeed
Writes a lot to stdout every time you invoke it. Most of it completely irrelevant.
When encountering error, waits for input. Neither ctrl-c nor ctrl-d will immediately kill it.
One newline does nothing, two makes new paragraph.
\textit \textbf \mathit \mathbf \emph \it \bf. Bold+italic works in normal mode but not in math mode.
Subfigures. Why? subfigure is deprecated. caption doesn't work with beamer. subfig doesnt work with hyperref. "It's true that subfig doesn't cooperate well with hyperref, but when the alternative is no subfloats at all …" http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/144782/subfigure-and-...
One newline does nothing, two makes new paragraph.
Why is this a problem? Many people advocate starting each sentence on a new line, so that diffs between versions of a document are more intelligible - they'll show you just the sentences that have changed, rather than whole paragraphs.
latexmk. It doesn't fix the slow build speed, but at least it figures out the correct number of rebuilds. It also has a mode that rebuilds as soon as an input file changes (using inotify et al).
I have to say, the underlying paper scares me a bit. It seems to be pretty heavy on research politics, driven by a very limited study, and the authors do not even seem to grasp the mechanics that underlie the generation of computer documents very well.
Example: "In all other cases, we think that scholarly journals should request authors to submit their documents in Word or PDF format. We believe that this would be a good policy for two reasons. First, we think that the appearance of the text is secondary to the scientific merit of an article and its impact to the field. And, second, preventing researchers from producing documents in LaTeX would save time and money to maximize the benefit of research and development for both the research team and the public."
I am honestly not sure how they think accepting papers in PDF format would prevent researchers "from producing documents in LaTeX". Do they really not know that not only can you generate PDF from LaTeX, but that that is what is commonly being done?
Second, do they really not understand that there are options other than Word or LaTeX? I know of quite a few people who use Pandoc (Markdown + some inline LaTeX for when you need equations/references) [1]. Others use a non-Word word processor (e.g. because they're running on Linux). Others again use LyX. This casts doubt upon their ability to make policy recommendations when their understanding of the available toolset is incomplete.
Third, the study seems to be awfully limited. In at least my field (computer science) tables and figures are often automatically generated from the data using scripts so as to avoid errors transcribing the data manually, so I personally don't really care how easy it is to type in a table by hand. How about long documents (e.g. a journal paper) broken down into multiple files? How do the various approaches compare for that? What about version control and collaboration mechanisms; e.g. how do the mechanisms for merging divergent document versions in Word compare with text files in LaTeX/etc. plus your off-the-shelf VCS of choice? Managing references? (I honestly don't know the answers to most of these questions, but I think they are important for a qualitative comparison.)
Fourth, drawing sweeping conclusions about public spending on research from such limited study that doesn't even account for half the stuff that's going on in writing a typical research paper (multi-author collaborations, researching and citing references, generation of tables and figures from data) is kinda ... out there.
Fifth, while you generally don't have to worry about researchers being able to afford a nice Windows or Mac system with MS Office and Endnote, the same may not hold for students. Especially when your research needs require decent POSIX-ish capabilities, in practice this means OS X or Linux. Plenty of students in engineering fields do run Linux by preference, and can run Word only via a dual-boot setup or virtual hosting. Forcing them to switch to Word would be counterproductive.
54 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] threadWith LaTeX I find I make a lot less accidental mistakes. If something goes wrong, I know exactly what caused it (just look at my changes!)
One of the benefits of LaTeX is that it practically forces you to do this.
Edit: Somehow I missed your second sentence, and so we are in agreement. LaTeX is better in this regard, because it forces good practice on the user.
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{letter} \signature{the user} \address{the user\\right here} \begin{letter}{Receiver\\somewhere over the rainbow} Bla bla bla ...
Not very different and you can ensure your letters look great.
My main gripe with latex is debugging. Writing in a latex will go all fast and productive, until I forget something trivial that ends up taking an hour to find because of cryptic error message during compile.
Last, I think it was a & symbol in text that I forgot to escape. Tex was throwing an error about unmatched {, with a line number way later than my ampersand. Gah, went crazy looking at my file in vim and being certain everything was matched.
It doesn't happen to me as much anymore, I've added a few vim plugins that help a lot (like rainbow parenthesis).
(My take on the short version: Of course it's very difficult to use LaTeX to reproduce a document's specific formatting. That's not what LaTeX is for. On the other hand, if you want to type a bunch of text with semantic labels (title, section, subsection, etc.) and use a journal-provided style file to format that text in precisely that journal's style, LaTeX is really, really easy.)
Note that this is also really, really easy in Word.
(In fact, I'm curious to know: do most folks using Word these days actually use the semantic elements like "title" and "heading 2"? Or is it still common for people to just hit "bold" and enlarge the font size?)
Math typesetting has been possible since 2007 in an integrated form (whereas the old formula editor was just an embedded OLE object, which you couldn't style, and which often didn't match the surrounding text in size and font). The syntax is similar to LaTeX, although (in my opinion) easier and faster to type because of a few syntactic niceties (see UTN #28).
And if you wanted automatic ToC generation your option has always (back at least several versions and two or three decades) been to use the proper styles Heading 1–9. Generally, if you want to keep your sanity you should be using styles everywhere and always. I don't use physical formatting at all. The benefits of that are the same as in LaTeX: You can change styles at will without going through all of your document and it's far easier to achieve a consistent look of the document.
But yes, every now and then I see people who approach »I want to make this a heading« as »I need to make this bold and larger«. I'm not sure how they are thinking (especially since Word since 2007 made styles much more prominent than the physical formatting), but there are such people. LaTeX's advantage here is that it needs education to use at all, which means that's the point where one can basically say »There are no ways of making things bold, only ways of emphasising more, which may be rendered as bold«. Word can and will be used without training and the results are exactly what you'd expect in that case.
I have switched to using HTML/CSS for creating my docs. It works !. It took a while to set it up but I love using it. If similar effort was put into making HTML useable for academic work, we would have been in travelling in interstellar space ! Anyway use the tool that your heart wants.
PS : The writer of Games of Thrones uses terminals from the 1960s ! So I don't think these questions matter.
It would be cool if you shared your system - does it produce print quality?
https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX
It renders client side and its pretty fast.
The only problem is matrix notation and latex macros.
I been trying in my free time playing with parsers like peg.js to find a way to create a robust system. but My knowledge in parsers is limited as an engineering student.
Here is a project that I created. I feel reluctant to share my real name but since you think it might be useful.
George RR Martin uses DOS based word processor from the 80s, not...60s...wordstar.
[0] http://weasyprint.org/
Also GoTs is years behind its schedule, but I wouldn't hold that up as evidence of anything.
I have printed my docs and there seems to be no difference between them that I can notice with my naked eyes.
The thing is, book publishers have people who will re-typeset a manuscript. Especially if written by a best selling author whose next books will sell in the millions.
By comparison, the academic press shifts most of that work on the authors. Academic authors don't get paid to write content and sometimes have to pay, don't get paid for typesetting, don't get paid for peer reviews, etc. (And Elsevier, one of the big academic presses, had a profit margin of 36% in 2010.)
If your heart wants to get published in an academic journal, then you may end up using a different tool than if your heart wants to publish on the web, or wants to publish a best-selling novel. By analogy, if my heart is set on doing Python programming, I won't be doing much microcontroller work. If my heart is set on optimizing the performance of dense linear solvers, then I likely won't do it in Python.
Essentially, the test is too limited for its purposes.
A huge advantage for LaTeX is the ability to copy and paste faithfully and modify easily. This is how novices learn. In Word, if you look at an example of something awesome, it tells you nothing on how to make it. With TeX, it is self-documenting on how to produce it and how to modify it.
Also, text tools can help greatly. One can easily integrate data sources piping text into these documents, handling tabular issues.
But the key is maintenance. If you need to make major changes, text documents are much easier to manage. TeX is used for documents that someone cares about, not some one-off letter to be written and forgotten. Though I would still prefer to use TeX even in that case, but I concede that that's just me.
I would like to propose a similar test, much more relevant to what scientists do in their jobs, where LaTeX would win hands down: Your paper was rejected from Journal A. You now want to submit it to Journal B. Your task is to convert the manuscript ao that it fits the Instructions for Authors for Journal B.
Has anyone used texmaker [1]? It looks like it would be good for beginners to the language, though clunky?
[1]: http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/texmakertop_big.png
http://www.lyx.org/
For beginners or people who don't know / don't want to learn Latex, it's great. It's a bit more clunky if you're more of a latex "power-user" and want to customise stuff, but still possible, though a regular latex editor might be a better choice in that case.
[1]: http://miktex.org/download
Well, I learnt a lot about LaTeX while using it for writing my undergradute thesis.
As much I admire LaTeX for its power/customizability, for typical non-tech/business docs I prefer Lyx nowadays. Feels like using MS Word, but powered by LaTeX :p
For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) gives good results for very little effort.
For most things, I use Org-Mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org/), which is an absolute joy to use. It outputs via Latex, and if you want a bit of extra customization you can include Latex statements verbatim. Org-Mode also works as a literate programming environment if you want to include and run bits of code, include parts of other files, or if you want to generate charts or diagrams.
Edit: I should also mention that org-mode has a great table editor.
https://www.overleaf.com/
https://www.sharelatex.com/
https://www.authorea.com/ (though this is not strictly LaTeX)
I completely agree with the current top comment; this study is much too limited to be of any use in real life.
How should it be done?
Writers from academia are effectively forced to use LaTeX. Writers who just start writing will use Word, because that's what's on Windows machines, and that's what they immediately have to hand. Besides, why should they know of the existence of other options?
They don't. Word will remain "popular" because even though everyone I know who uses it "in anger" hates it, nevertheless, people don't know of any effective alternatives. Those who use LaTeX will continue to revel in the power of it, and shrug about how many people are hamstrung by Word.
I, for one, would love to see a genuine and informative comparison. This paper is the closest I've seen, and while many people sneer at it, no real alternatives have been offered.
For web development, HTML, CSS, Javascript can be written directly, or generated by some other template language like haml, slim, coffeescript, sass, stylus, etc.
I believe the same applies to TeX. Although AFAIK there aren't template languages targeting TeX, treating TeX as "dynamic HTML" or just use your favorite language to generate TeX sometimes turns out to be much cleaner and more maintainable code. The generated TeX is not human-read friendly, but just works.
(Note: I'm one of the co-founders of Overleaf, so any feedback is appreciated, thanks. My co-founder has also put together this free introductory course for anyone that's looking to give LaTeX a try: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/learn/free-online-introductio...)
LaTeX makes me feel like I'm in control of my document. I've had word processors do really weird things that I could never explain. In LaTeX, I can always get an explanation.
Thanks to programs like LyX, http://www.lyx.org/, one can have the power of both understanding the underlying and the high level startup speed of WYSIWYG{M}, and one doesn't need to make a billion trips to TeX StackExchange.
If you need a quick throwaway document that doesn't need to be maintained, and you don't care if it looks professionally typeset, Word is ideal, just type (although arguably LyX offers the same).
If you need a document that will receive a lot of scrutiny, and you're going to maintain it again and again (like a resume, CV, business card (yeah, I did it), academic paper, etc...) you should go with LaTeX. Get the look right, and don't worry about it any more.
We use HTML for web, which is very public and maintained. We need a markup language for printed text that has the same expectations. LaTeX is that.
Automatic figure placement sounds good in theory, but in practice you have to manually fix everything up.
pdflatex && pdflatex && bibtex && pdflatex
Slow buildspeed
Writes a lot to stdout every time you invoke it. Most of it completely irrelevant.
When encountering error, waits for input. Neither ctrl-c nor ctrl-d will immediately kill it.
One newline does nothing, two makes new paragraph.
\textit \textbf \mathit \mathbf \emph \it \bf. Bold+italic works in normal mode but not in math mode.
Subfigures. Why? subfigure is deprecated. caption doesn't work with beamer. subfig doesnt work with hyperref. "It's true that subfig doesn't cooperate well with hyperref, but when the alternative is no subfloats at all …" http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/144782/subfigure-and-...
Why is this a problem? Many people advocate starting each sentence on a new line, so that diffs between versions of a document are more intelligible - they'll show you just the sentences that have changed, rather than whole paragraphs.
latexmk. It doesn't fix the slow build speed, but at least it figures out the correct number of rebuilds. It also has a mode that rebuilds as soon as an input file changes (using inotify et al).
Example: "In all other cases, we think that scholarly journals should request authors to submit their documents in Word or PDF format. We believe that this would be a good policy for two reasons. First, we think that the appearance of the text is secondary to the scientific merit of an article and its impact to the field. And, second, preventing researchers from producing documents in LaTeX would save time and money to maximize the benefit of research and development for both the research team and the public."
I am honestly not sure how they think accepting papers in PDF format would prevent researchers "from producing documents in LaTeX". Do they really not know that not only can you generate PDF from LaTeX, but that that is what is commonly being done?
Second, do they really not understand that there are options other than Word or LaTeX? I know of quite a few people who use Pandoc (Markdown + some inline LaTeX for when you need equations/references) [1]. Others use a non-Word word processor (e.g. because they're running on Linux). Others again use LyX. This casts doubt upon their ability to make policy recommendations when their understanding of the available toolset is incomplete.
Third, the study seems to be awfully limited. In at least my field (computer science) tables and figures are often automatically generated from the data using scripts so as to avoid errors transcribing the data manually, so I personally don't really care how easy it is to type in a table by hand. How about long documents (e.g. a journal paper) broken down into multiple files? How do the various approaches compare for that? What about version control and collaboration mechanisms; e.g. how do the mechanisms for merging divergent document versions in Word compare with text files in LaTeX/etc. plus your off-the-shelf VCS of choice? Managing references? (I honestly don't know the answers to most of these questions, but I think they are important for a qualitative comparison.)
Fourth, drawing sweeping conclusions about public spending on research from such limited study that doesn't even account for half the stuff that's going on in writing a typical research paper (multi-author collaborations, researching and citing references, generation of tables and figures from data) is kinda ... out there.
Fifth, while you generally don't have to worry about researchers being able to afford a nice Windows or Mac system with MS Office and Endnote, the same may not hold for students. Especially when your research needs require decent POSIX-ish capabilities, in practice this means OS X or Linux. Plenty of students in engineering fields do run Linux by preference, and can run Word only via a dual-boot setup or virtual hosting. Forcing them to switch to Word would be counterproductive.
[1] See, for example, Kieran Healy's write-up here: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/