@PaulGessler Well, Tufte must be a Microsoft word user then :) Justified text is more elegant and shows uniformity. Ragged text distracts the eyes due to it making the text looks out of place from one line to the next. any way, I myself prefer justified text, as one gets with Latex.

The authors should have read this indesignsecrets.com/why-use-indesign-instead-of-ms-word.php before telling us how good word is. At least if they argued for indesign vs. Latex, the paper might hold more weight. Author conclusion there is :"SUMMARY … much more time spent in layout/production… much more money spent at prepress to get usable film out of the files… and a crappy product coming off the press"

@Nasser Not only Tufte disagrees with justified text, also Jan Tschichold did it almost a century before. I find justified texts elegant but sometimes boring, also it needs a very good control of the space, something that Word and in general the word processors do very bad. The ragged aligned texts can refresh the page and are a much better option when you work in very narrow columns. No program accomplishes justify either very short lines, so as you can see, also has its legitimate uses.

@Nasser Interesting link, I am also a InDesign user, and I prefer it also instead of Word, but many times I prefer instead LaTeX the most of time. I save a lot of time using a LaTeX class instead of define all the parameter for a page well designed with InDesign.

This has also come up on c.t.t.

very interesting discussion! Well, I unfortunately still did not have the time to read the whole article, but I read the conclusions and they sound quite harsh to me. The paper seems to be stating that people waste time and money writing "non-technical" academic papers with LaTeX instead of Word?! That's ridicoulous in my opinion, especially as lots of MS Word users from the non-technical sciences have lots of problems with their software and especially with the final formatting of a thesis.

@Martin Published articles are different from a thesis or other internal document, of course

@JosephWright: ok, that's true.

@Martin There is though a link if one thinks about reusing content

@Martin Much the same as my take: at best it's a test of how fast people type

some other discussions:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002

@michal.h21 Much as you'd expect: most realistic people would go for Word or similar for the task presented, particularly given the time pressure

@JosephWright yeah, me too :(

@michal.h21 There's nothing wrong with that: I'd love to have a copy of Adobe Illustrator for doing posters, for example, as they are clearly visual

but on the other hand, for more serious projects I would always go with LaTeX. I use markdown for tex4ht tutorial and while it is nice to use shortcuts for sections and emphasizing, I lack LaTeX features regarding code samples - I must include files manually, while with minted for example I may choose to input just some lines, etc, without need to copy anything. Now I realized that my example is too complicated from the beginning and I have to manually update all the listings

@michal.h21 Back with the issue in measuring productivity in an isolated task: it very much depends what you are doing. For a one-off, doing things by hand is almost always faster than automation, but if you do it a lot then the time cost of some scripting is (possibly) worth it

@JosephWright plus less risk of RSI

the math example in the paper has a typo -- an extra parenthesis at the end of the second line of equation 64 in figure 3. asking anyone with any fluency in math notation to reproduce this would (in my estimation) guarantee an "error". wonder how this would be accounted for in the statistics?

@barbarabeeton Oops

@KennyPeanuts, @KeksDose I know I said this yesterday, but it would be good if you'd pop into the chat room that's been set up to discuss the PLOS ONE article

@JosephWright -- sticking my neck out, i have posted a comment on the plos one site in response to the article. i have other concerns about the article as well -- i consider the "preventing researchers from producing documents in latex" to be inflammatory, and not supported by the evidence. but i'm soliciting other opinions on that before going "public" (i.e., outside the tex community) with a comment.

@barbarabeeton Certainly goes a long way for a single study: if it were a similarly 'loaded' comment in a paper in my area (chemistry) and I was asked to review I'd probably suggest it was changed

@barbarabeeton I suspect there will be a lot of comeback: the test itself may have issues as well as the wider 'is this realistic' business

@barbarabeeton the "preventing researchers from producing documents in latex" is nuts. I commented on it earlier. I'm surprised it wasn't caught in review.

Where do these nutjobs think they live? In 1984?

@FaheemMitha On c.t.t. there is a feeling this might be a hoax: I'm not so sure but might explain them being 'nutjobs'

@FaheemMitha Of course, if we assume they are serious then 'nutjobs' might not be the best thing to call them if you want to engage in real discussion

@JosephWright Dunno. It's a pretty weird article. And I don't think PLOS is exactly selective what they publish. Though they do do peer review. I had an article published by them once.

@JosephWright Well, I'm not trying to engage them in discussion here.

It's just a comment. But a fair one, I think. I don't call people nutjobs lightly.

If you talk about "preventing" people using LaTeX, I think the appelation is reasonable.

Oh, maybe you meant discussion in general, not with the authors.

@FaheemMitha My understanding is PLOS do expect 'proper' science but there isn't a threshold in terms of 'impact' or area

@FaheemMitha I was thinking if you want to go back to them: others might well agree with you

@JosephWright Back to them? How so?

@JosephWright Supposedly they verify scientific correctness and methodology.

@FaheemMitha Yes

But for what they do, they really overcharge. And their staff is a bunch of space cadets. I had a time with them.

Should that be "staff are..."? Staff is singular, though.

@FaheemMitha 'staff are'

@JosephWright hmm.

@JosephWright -- u.s.: "staff is"; u.k.: "staff are". well known regional variation.

@barbarabeeton You are the editing professional

@barbarabeeton I'm wondering about 'space cadets': to me it means something to me that I suspect is not meant!

@JosephWright -- alan munn could have answered this as well; it's a linguistic property, not just an editorial decision.

@barbarabeeton I guess I'd say that this is one and the same thing: linguistic variants are determined by usage, usage is determined by decisions in 'blessed' situations, etc.

@JosephWright -- "space cadets" implies that the "space" is in their heads. i think you've understood it as meant.

And also, my intuition is for 'are' even though for most of the British collective plurals I prefer singular.

@AlanMunn In any case, one for the main room rather than here, I guess

@barbarabeeton Funny, I've always understood it as their heads were in space, not that space was in their heads. :)

@AlanMunn -- "staff are" ==> "members of the staff", implied. not sure what i'd say if i were responding off the cuff, and not thinking about it. might depend on the particular circumstances.

@barbarabeeton Yes, I completely agree. So N. American English has some of these collective plurals, it's just not as productive as Br. English.

@AlanMunn -- in this case, aren't both explanations equivalent?

@barbarabeeton Sure, which is often the case for such idioms. We agree on the meaning but have totally opposite compositions.

"space cadet" is meant as in "spacey". A similar term might be "airhead".

@barbarabeeton It's exactly the way some of the very common idioms get rejigged: "take something for granite", "a pigment of one's imagination" etc.

According to the folks on english.sx (who weren't interested) both versions are used.

@FaheemMitha Yes, not how I'd understand it: for me, equivalent to 'away with the fairies'

So, it's a gray area.

@JosephWright "away with the fairies"?

Oh, like daydreamer? No, that's not exactly what I meant.

@FaheemMitha To some extent, perhaps more 'out of touch with the real world'

@JosephWright Ah, ok

Helpful link from english.sx:

@FaheemMitha -- "airhead" to me is (are?) the staff that produces the "annals of improbable research". (off topic, but i couldn't resist.)

@AlanMunn -- my favorite rejiggings are "water over the bridge" and "water under the dam". quite unseemly, i think.

@barbarabeeton :)

I had a "road to Damascus" moment in 1999, as commemorated at that time to a friend. with regard to using word processors (specifically Word) vs LaTeX.

@FaheemMitha And you've been unproductive ever since. :)

@AlanMunn :-)

It is actually kind of an amusing letter. Here is a paste:

Apparently we used floppies once.

@FaheemMitha :) As I've said earlier, I think, I can no longer open my dissertation Word document, (done on Word5 for the Mac) so I just have a PDF. And somewhere in a filing cabinet in my basement I have some 8in floppies... from a time when they really were floppy.

@AlanMunn Can't one convert those Word docs to ASCII?

It would probably involve digging up an old mac from my Mac graveyard. But it also uses fonts in non-TTF format etc. But it's not worth the effort. People can just read the PDF, and most of the chapters have been published anyway.

@AlanMunn Ok

@JosephWright Sorry for not answering a whole day: I'm leaving with my family for a short vacation and preparing this kept me busy all day. Still I'm upset about that stupid article. The idea that you can judge a software meant to type scientifical articles and books by the time in minutes it takes for users to copy a given layout is so incredible ridiculous! This article brings dishonor to the authors and the journal which published such a nonsense.

@KeksDose No problem: was mainly wanting to be sure you saw that a discussion was going on

@KeksDose The issues with the approach have come up here and in other places (see stars, for example)

@KeksDose I don't think it reflects that well on PLOS ONE, I'd agree

Answer, part 2: BUT! Joseph, you as a moderator may be able to check my "CV" on tex.sx. I opposed closing questions in many cases, except duplicates and, well, four letter words. Here on tex.sx to many people love closing questions and deleting answers, because they weren't answeres, but comments. This is annoying for OPs and often goes to far. At an earlier occasion I complained about this habit on meta tex.sx.

@KeksDose The site structure is designed for things with some form of answer: it really doesn't work well for discussion

@KeksDose I don't think this is the forum for discussing that issue. But the whole StackExchange model is based on different principles. Which for many of us is what keeps us here.

Answer part 3: Damn, wrote "to" instead of "too".

@KeksDose As I tried to indicate, I didn't close the question myself, I just tided up the close reason as 'opinion based' felt better than 'off topic' (mod closing is not appropriate for such a question)

@JosephWright OK, you are right.

@KeksDose I wouldn't go that far :-)

@JosephWright But on meta of stackexchange itself there are questions about the opinions of the folks, asked by stackexchange. I agree, the format is not optimal, but with some answers and many comments we do quite well.

@KeksDose It's well-known that the 'meta' business is at best a compromise: it's not the best way to discuss things, but with the restriction of discussing how sites work it is (just about) working as an approach

The message is: People here get seduced by the possibility to close and delete and there is a consensus between too many of the best aids here to do that in cases where the decision is doubtful.

And I ask you: 70 visites in an hours time, more than 20 comments, many votes -- and "they" closed the question as off topic.

@KeksDose As I've said, I really would welcome a meta thread on this

@KeksDose Speaking personally, I do think it's off-topic: we know about TeX and are not in a position to evaluate measurements of productivity

@KeksDose But as a mod I didn't vote to close before allowing discussion, and I really do encourage you to hold such a discussion

@KeksDose Lots of visits don't make things on-topic or objective, I'm afraid. There are lots of things we could discuss at length that would attract interest, but the StackExchange model is not meant to handle that

@KeksDose Are you following any of the threaded discussions in other places?

This silly paper is getting a lot of discussion. Probably more than it deserves.

@JosephWright I had a quick glance on c.t.t. and another site. But like here: The discussion is not to the point. Besides that, there probably is not much to say, anyway. And now have to leave, large way to drive tomorrow. @JosephWright, thank you for time and effort!

@KeksDose If one could design another experiment that would address some of the issues, it could be published as a formal reply to the paper.