Dear Christophe, Great work. You should submit it to http://www.plosone.org/ as a response. It would be interesting to see what the Referees make of it.
Best wishes, Colin. > Hi all, > > After seeing Ken's mail: > > Le 26/12/2014 23:47, Ken Mankoff a écrit : >> 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? >> >> -k. >> >> > and some of replies it triggered on the list, I went to check the paper. > As many of you guys I found some "results" puzzling in particular: > 1. the use of bar graphs when the data would better be displayed > directly (that qualifies immediately the paper as "low quality" for me). > 2. the larger error bars observed for LaTeX when compared to Word. > 3. the systematic inverse relationship between the blue and pink bars > heights. > > So I went to figshare to download the data and looked at them. A quick > and dirty "analysis" is attached to this mail in PDF format (generated > with org, of course, and this awful software called LaTeX!) and the > source org file can be found at the bottom of this mail. I used R to do > the figures (and I'm sure the authors of the paper will then criticize > me for not using Excel with which everyone knows errors are generated > much more efficiently). > > I managed to understand the inverse relationship in point 3 above: the > authors considered 3 types of mistakes / errors: > 1. Formatting and typos error. > 2. Orthographic and grammatical errors. > 3. Missing words and signs. > Clearly, following the mail of Tom (Dye) on the list and on the Plos web > site, I would argue that formatting errors in LaTeX are bona fide bugs. > But the point I want to make is that the third source accounts for 80% > of the total errors (what's shown in pink bars in the paper) and clearly > the authors counted what the subjects did not have time to type as an > error of this type. Said differently, the blue and pink bars are showing > systematically the same thing by construction! The second type of error > in not a LaTeX issue (and in fact does not differ significantly from the > Word case) but an "environment" issue (what spelling corrector had the > LaTeX users access to?). > > There is another strange thing in the table copy case. For both the > expert and novice group in LaTeX, there is one among 10 subjects that > did produce 0% of the table but still manage to produce 22 typographic > errors! > > The overall worst performance of LaTeX users remains to be explained and > as mentioned in on the mails in the list, that does not make sense at > least for the continuous text exercise. The method section of the paper > is too vague but my guess is that some LaTeX users did attempt to > reproduce the exact layout of the text they had to copy, something LaTeX > is definitely not design to provide quickly. > > One more point: how many of you guys could specify their total number of > hours of experience with LaTeX (or any other software you are currently > using)? That what the subjects of this study had to specify... > > Let me know what you think, > > Christophe > > ----- Snip -----
