A short while ago I wrote about the Knauff & Nejasmic study claiming to show that when Academics are writing papers they are more efficient with Word than with LaTeX. That study was, in my and several others’ opinions, completely bogus. My original post details some of the problems with it, but you should see Claus Wilke’s post for a more thorough analysis.
When I wrote the original post, I thought it was just another annoying academic paper aimed mostly at getting a pub credit. But now Nature, an indisputably serious journal, is reporting on the brouhaha. They say that paper has generated an uproar online. One commenter tweeted that it will be the most controversial paper of the decade. Another tweeted what most Irreal readers already know: LaTex is much better at taking care of things like bibliographies and renumbering equations and sections and the like.
One frequent reviewer of scientific papers says that the ones prepared with LaTeX were 500% better than those prepared with Word. I’m tempted to comment on that but will forebear.
As I reported recently, I’ve been learning to use AUCTeX lately and I can promise you that anyone having even a moderate facility with it will easily outperform a Word user. That’s especially true in a fair fight where LaTeX was evaluated in the manner it was intended to be used.
And by the way, is it really that hard to learn LaTeX? It’s a little off-putting to hear an academic—especially one in the sciences—complain that LaTex requires significant effort to learn.