Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex
For anyone who thinks that the author here (D. J. Bernstein) is biased in favour of LaTeX, he has elsewhere written one of the most stinging criticisms I&#x27;ve seen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cr.yp.to&#x2F;writing&#x2F;visual.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cr.yp.to&#x2F;writing&#x2F;visual.html</a> (LaTeX haters, enjoy!)<p>The point of <i>this</i> blog post here (the OP) is just that the study by Knauff and Nejasmic is really awful, for the reasons it mentions: studies the wrong metric, etc. (<i>Of course</i> typing &quot;see [41]&quot; would be more efficient than typing &quot;see \cite{multiplication-survey}&quot; for instance.) Far from the authors&#x27; claim of a “highly realistic working conditions”.<p>(Also this blog post is titled “part 1” so I imagine there will be future blog posts either on this specific topic, or on measuring the wrong metric, in general?)<p>Edit: Some of the comments here seemed odd to me, until I noticed that this HN submission is titled <i>“Measuring &quot;efficiency&quot; in document prepration [sic]: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex [sic]”</i>, while the actual blog post is titled <i>“Optimizing for the wrong metric, part 1: Microsoft Word”</i> and has the subtitle <i>“Review of &quot;An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development&quot; by Knauff and Nejasmic.”</i> From the HN submission title, I can imagine that before clicking one may expect the link to contain a measurement or comparison, rather than a review of some paper. Titles of articles are already (in general) a poor indicator of their contents, but please don&#x27;t editorialize titles to make them <i>less</i> representative!