Hey, remember that silly opinion piece masquerading as a scientific paper by Knauff and Nejasmic back in 2014? It claimed that Word was much more efficient than LaTeX for writing papers. I wrote about it more than once (1, 2, 3, 4) at the time. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I just came upon some further (recent) commentary by D. J. Bernstein that seems to me to be on point.
Although he finds the paper weak on many grounds, Bernstein’s main point is that the study uses the wrong metric to measure the two systems’ efficiency. Putting aside the ludicrous notion of “realistic working conditions” used by Knauff and Nejasmic, Bernstein notes that writing the initial version of a paper is only the beginning of the document preparation process. As much or more efforts goes into revision and editing and that’s one of the places where LaTeX shines.
Bernstein begins his post with an anecdote about watching a couple of interns insert a new item into a numbered list. They did this by renumbering the following items by hand. One intern did the work, the other checked his results. That should make any Irreal reader hyperventilate. None of us, I’m sure, would do such a thing. After all, we use decent editors and typesetters that make such things easy. But the story is on point because this is exactly the type of thing that Knauff and Nejasmic ignore in their comparative study of the efficiency of Word and LaTeX.
It’s been over 6 years since I first wrote about this so it’s not too unreasonable to return for one further flogging but I hope that this is the last time that I or anyone else ever hears of this study. Except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale.