![]() Word is just a better tool for large documents, and i say this asn ardent anti-ide guy. ![]() *words symbol editor (which also existed pre-1997) is quite up to the task of most equations (again, imo i've not done a lot of hairy equations) * the visual "View changes"mode in word is quite natural and even allows for some offline discourse with your collaborators as each user's comments and changes are marked with a different color and comments are allowed. other documents that use that as a template inherit all styles and so forth) * templates have been in word from a long time and imo are quite natural because they're prototype-based (ie, you can make any document AFTER you create it into a template. * citations and refs are supported, although I dont know if all styles of citations are. * collaboration was possible then with child and shared docs, it should only be better now. * figures can be edited in-place or embedded from original source. You can format across all child documents from the master. * large docs can be handled by splitting them into master-child documents. I used word for a large project (undergrad project report of 100+ pages with 4 member team) in 1997 and even then word had features for most (if not all) of the items in your list: Maybe we should invest in smarter/better/more productive LaTeX editors?Įdit: formatting, added citations point. I think the authors make a good point though. Ideally, you can forgot about the formatting in those cases. * I always use templates, and this speeds up the writing process significantly. * I agree to a certain extent with the authors that scientific content is more important than the form, but I do prefer a traditional LaTeX look over Word documents. * Comparing different versions of the same document(s) is much easier with plain text (diff), although you can do something similar with PDF's * Version control with plain text files is rather convenient. * The authors mention it in the conclusions, but I think the test should also have included a scenario based on using templates instead of building something from scratch. * Collaborating: merging several documents into one big report, especially if other authors do not follow formatting guidelines etc. * Lots of figures that get updated during the writing process * Large documents (50+ pages) (I remember having to deal with file corruptions, figures appearing at random places, formatting suddenly has a free will. Although I have only used Word (and LibreOffice Writer, odd the article doesn't even mention it) sporadically over the last years (and only for simple documents), I do wonder how Word and friends perform in settings that were not part of the experiment that is reported here: This is quite interesting, and given my experience with LaTeX (I am a post-doc and prefer working with LaTeX), I often wonder if it is all worth the trouble. Yes, LaTeX can undeniably be a pain in the arse, especially when it comes to trying to get figures in the right place however the combination of a simple, semantic plain-text representation with a flexible and professional typesetting and rendering engine are undeniable and completely unaddressed by this study. If Word disallowed local formatting changes (including things such as relative spacing of nested bullet points), forcing all formatting changes to be done in document-global styles, it would be a far better typesetting system. This may sound like a relatively insignificant point, but in practice, almost every Word document I have seen has some form of inconsistent formatting. Word has some similar capabilities with styles, and can be used in a similar manner, though few Word users actually use the software properly. Like CSS, this allows the actual formatting to be abstracted away, allowing plain (marked-up) content to be written without worrying about typesetting. The separation of the semantic definition of the content from the rendering of the document is, in my opinion, the most important feature of LaTeX. In theory, a LaTeX file should strictly be a semantic representation of the content of the document while TeX may have been a raw typesetting language, this is most definitely not the intended use case of LaTeX and is overall a very poor test of its relative advantages and capabilities. From what I gather, the participants in the study were required to reproduce the formatting and layout of the sample text. I question the validity of their methodology.Īt no point in the paper is exactly what is meant by a "formatting error" or a "typesetting error" defined.
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