We therefore suggest that leading scientific journals should consider accepting submissions in LaTeX only if this is justified by the level of mathematics presented in the paper. Their frustration runs deep as they urge publish to restrict or even ban the use of LaTeX. In this story, they are not objective observers. It is clear that Knauff and Nejasmic have been frustrated by their collaboration with computer scientists that expected them to use LaTeX. They also make no attempt to measure how much of this type of purely secretarial work scientists do… or whether it is representative of what scientists do. They compare Word and LaTeX on a data entry job akin to what you might ask from a secretary. They do not even try to assess the tools in the scientific workflow (data generation, analysis, processing, figure generation, and so on). I should stress that Knauff and Nejasmic did not have authors compose a document, let alone craft an actual research article, let alone a sophisticated scientific article. LaTeX is not suited for quick-and-dirty jobs. Of course, those of us using LaTeX are aware of these shortcomings. They show that you can copy a simple document (containing little mathematics) faster and with fewer errors when using Word. Two German psychology professors, Knauff and Nejasmic, recently published a paper on the benefits of Microsoft Word over LaTeX.
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