From: Colin Baxter <m43cap@yandex.com>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word ---LOOK AT THE DATA!
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:59:11 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87h9wb4uxs.fsf@redstar.home> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 54A078C8.90501@gmail.com
Dear Christophe,
Great work. You should submit it to http://www.plosone.org/ as a
response. It would be interesting to see what the Referees make of it.
Best wishes,
Colin.
> Hi all,
>
> After seeing Ken's mail:
>
> Le 26/12/2014 23:47, Ken Mankoff a écrit :
>> People here might be interested in a publication from [2014-12-19 Fri]
>> available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
>>
>> Title: An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used
>> in Academic Research and Development
>>
>> Summary: Word users are more efficient and have less errors than even
>> experienced LaTeX users.
>>
>> Someone here should repeat experiment and add Org into the mix, perhaps
>> Org -> ODT and/or Org -> LaTeX and see if it helps or hurts. I assume
>> Org would trump LaTeX, but would Org -> ODT or Org -> X -> DOCX (via
>> pandoc) beat straight Word?
>>
>> -k.
>>
>>
> and some of replies it triggered on the list, I went to check the paper.
> As many of you guys I found some "results" puzzling in particular:
> 1. the use of bar graphs when the data would better be displayed
> directly (that qualifies immediately the paper as "low quality" for me).
> 2. the larger error bars observed for LaTeX when compared to Word.
> 3. the systematic inverse relationship between the blue and pink bars
> heights.
>
> So I went to figshare to download the data and looked at them. A quick
> and dirty "analysis" is attached to this mail in PDF format (generated
> with org, of course, and this awful software called LaTeX!) and the
> source org file can be found at the bottom of this mail. I used R to do
> the figures (and I'm sure the authors of the paper will then criticize
> me for not using Excel with which everyone knows errors are generated
> much more efficiently).
>
> I managed to understand the inverse relationship in point 3 above: the
> authors considered 3 types of mistakes / errors:
> 1. Formatting and typos error.
> 2. Orthographic and grammatical errors.
> 3. Missing words and signs.
> Clearly, following the mail of Tom (Dye) on the list and on the Plos web
> site, I would argue that formatting errors in LaTeX are bona fide bugs.
> But the point I want to make is that the third source accounts for 80%
> of the total errors (what's shown in pink bars in the paper) and clearly
> the authors counted what the subjects did not have time to type as an
> error of this type. Said differently, the blue and pink bars are showing
> systematically the same thing by construction! The second type of error
> in not a LaTeX issue (and in fact does not differ significantly from the
> Word case) but an "environment" issue (what spelling corrector had the
> LaTeX users access to?).
>
> There is another strange thing in the table copy case. For both the
> expert and novice group in LaTeX, there is one among 10 subjects that
> did produce 0% of the table but still manage to produce 22 typographic
> errors!
>
> The overall worst performance of LaTeX users remains to be explained and
> as mentioned in on the mails in the list, that does not make sense at
> least for the continuous text exercise. The method section of the paper
> is too vague but my guess is that some LaTeX users did attempt to
> reproduce the exact layout of the text they had to copy, something LaTeX
> is definitely not design to provide quickly.
>
> One more point: how many of you guys could specify their total number of
> hours of experience with LaTeX (or any other software you are currently
> using)? That what the subjects of this study had to specify...
>
> Let me know what you think,
>
> Christophe
>
>
----- Snip -----
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-12-31 16:59 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-12-26 22:47 Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word Ken Mankoff
2014-12-26 23:36 ` Thomas S. Dye
2014-12-27 2:21 ` briangpowell .
2014-12-27 14:36 ` Eric S Fraga
2014-12-27 3:26 ` Christopher W. Ryan
2014-12-28 22:45 ` Bob Newell
2014-12-27 4:27 ` Nick Dokos
2014-12-27 9:06 ` Peter Neilson
2014-12-27 14:38 ` Eric S Fraga
2014-12-27 9:48 ` Achim Gratz
2014-12-27 10:05 ` Paul Rudin
2014-12-27 10:36 ` M
2014-12-27 11:36 ` Fabrice Popineau
2014-12-28 22:43 ` Pascal Fleury
2014-12-31 18:19 ` Paul Rudin
2014-12-27 13:37 ` Daniele Pizzolli
2014-12-28 21:40 ` Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word ---LOOK AT THE DATA! Christophe Pouzat
2014-12-29 19:47 ` Thomas S. Dye
2014-12-31 16:59 ` Colin Baxter [this message]
2015-01-04 20:38 ` Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word John Kitchin
2015-01-04 21:15 ` Andreas Leha
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