From: Fabrice Popineau <fabrice.popineau@supelec.fr>
To: M <Elwood151@web.de>
Cc: Paul Rudin <paul@rudin.co.uk>,
emacs orgmode-mailinglist <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 12:36:50 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAFgFV9NU3U3vC+acxAJONVB6icP9QXMtBZ01AK_NVWjB1Xsm8Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <D0C44A59.21E88%Elwood151@web.de>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3744 bytes --]
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).
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
------------------------------
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4980 bytes --]
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-12-27 11:37 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 [this message]
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
2015-01-04 20:38 ` Efficiency of Org v. LaTeX v. Word John Kitchin
2015-01-04 21:15 ` Andreas Leha
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://www.orgmode.org/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=CAFgFV9NU3U3vC+acxAJONVB6icP9QXMtBZ01AK_NVWjB1Xsm8Q@mail.gmail.com \
--to=fabrice.popineau@supelec.fr \
--cc=Elwood151@web.de \
--cc=emacs-orgmode@gnu.org \
--cc=paul@rudin.co.uk \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).