From: Pascal Fleury <fleury@users.sourceforge.net>
To: Fabrice Popineau <fabrice.popineau@supelec.fr>
Cc: M <Elwood151@web.de>, Paul Rudin <paul@rudin.co.uk>,
emacs orgmode-mailinglist <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 23:43:44 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CA+p9wPD6uZzqB+xC996Jf02kUwJSPM0gUGzyOm7cRpebtdoQYw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAFgFV9NU3U3vC+acxAJONVB6icP9QXMtBZ01AK_NVWjB1Xsm8Q@mail.gmail.com>
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On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Fabrice Popineau <
fabrice.popineau@supelec.fr> wrote:
> I agree that this study is certainly not large enough to draw strong
> conclusions, but it raises a couple of questions
> and some points may require attention.
>
> I have spent many years in the TeX world. I see how lots of people use TeX
> : students, professionals, researchers etc...
> and I would easily draw 2 categories of people :
> - those who are programmers "in their soul" (DEK once said that 2% or so
> of the whole human race is gifted with programming, the same way some
> people are gifted to play music etc.)
> - those who use LaTeX "because it is the best typesetting system"
> People who belong to the intersection of those 2 categories will certainly
> be very efficient in producing documents with LaTeX, much more than what
> this study shows.
> But people from the first category may also be efficient in producing
> documents with Word (Word is programmable too and the typesetting engine is
> fancier than most people would believe).
>
That is funny, as I still face regularly Word typeset documents that do not
handle orphan lines properly, and have at least 2 fonts as "body text".
Easy to fix, but a non-issue in Latex.
As a researcher, handling references and cross-references is not something
that is "amortized" on a one-off paper, it's something that pays off over a
few documents. And in a publish-or-perish world, this does usually not take
long.
As a programmer, I like to be able to run one command (call it 'make' if
you wish...) that will run some analysis and recompute both the figures and
the document into a new version, possibly versionned.
And now you know why I use orgmode too...
--paf
> The real problem is the guys from the second category who stick to use a
> tool they are not comfortable with but they don't want to admit it.
> Over the last years, I have seen more and more students come with LaTeX
> documents which had a very poor appearance.
> There has been a lot of pressure with the rise of Linux to use LaTeX.
> Unfortunately the results of using LaTeX may not be up to the expectations.
> The tool is too complex. It can produce beautiful documents when used
> right, but it can also easily produce awful documents.
> You can also spend a lot of time in fixing details, and it happens more
> frequently than even proficient LaTeX users would admit.
> In the end, I think the tendency is to a growing number of LaTeX users who
> use it poorly.
>
> Finally, today, my experience is that publishers charge much more for
> LaTeX documents than for Word (or similar tools) documents and they are
> reluctant to use LaTeX because of its complexity.
>
> That was my $0.02
>
> Fabrice
>
> 2014-12-27 11:36 GMT+01:00 M <Elwood151@web.de>:
>
>> > Von: Paul Rudin <paul@rudin.co.uk>
>> > Datum: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 10:05:19 +0000
>> > An: <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
>> > Betreff: Re: [O] Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word
>> >
>> > Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com> writes:
>> >
>> >> People here might be interested in a publication from [2014-12-19 Fri]
>> >> available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
>> >>
>> >> Title: An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used
>> >> in Academic Research and Development
>> >>
>> >> Summary: Word users are more efficient and have less errors than even
>> >> experienced LaTeX users.
>> >>
>> >> Someone here should repeat experiment and add Org into the mix, perhaps
>> >> Org -> ODT and/or Org -> LaTeX and see if it helps or hurts. I assume
>> >> Org would trump LaTeX, but would Org -> ODT or Org -> X -> DOCX (via
>> >> pandoc) beat straight Word?
>> >>
>> >
>> > No mention of emacs... who uses anything else to prepare their LaTeX?
>> >
>> Did you forget the " ;-)" or are you serious?
>>
>> Emacs is for sure a very good one, but there are a lot of popular
>> alternatives, if you have a look at the (for sure not representative)
>> voting
>> on the answers of this discussion here:
>>
>> http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/339/latex-editors-ides
>>
>> (It's clear, that people may have voted for several of those editors, so
>> that no valid statistics at all, but at least an idea...)
>>
>> Is there any real survey result about which editors LaTeX users use?
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Fabrice Popineau
> -----------------------------
> SUPELEC
> Département Informatique
> 3, rue Joliot Curie
> 91192 Gif/Yvette Cedex
> Tel direct : +33 (0) 169851950
> Standard : +33 (0) 169851212
> ------------------------------
>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-12-28 22:43 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 [this message]
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
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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