I cannot seem to find anywhere in the paper that describes whether the mistakes were counted during or after the participant claimed to be finished. If it's the latter, then it could easily be attributed to the lack of a live preview and spell-checking, which is a technological problem easily fixed.
Moreover, the study only uses extremely small documents (with only a few mathematical equations) in their study. The power in TeX comes from defining project-wide macros and label management, allowing for instantaneous refactoring, tidy management of multiple versions of a document using imports and versioning, and seamless integration with whatever terminal tools you already use.
In other words, this paper's implied conclusions are short-sighted because TeX does much more than print the written word (or mathematical/tabular data). I would like to see the same study extended; make the same groups refactor a twenty page document, replacing one notation with another, reorganizing the sections, adding new figures, and reformatting the bibliography according to a different standard.
Yes, collaboration and maintenance is another plus for TeX, which was not considered in this study.
However, spell/grammar checking and the longer edit-compile-review cycle (e.g. when coding TikZ pictures) is still an issue for me where Word probably has an advantage.
Any tool suggestions for grammar checking LaTeX documents? I use vim's spell checking, which is ok, but a tool which understands grammar could be better than a simple dictionary lookup.
I do my diagrams outside of LaTeX, or at least separately. I don't see an advantage of having them done with the text given that the typesetting of a fixed rect is trivial.
Though it's a totally unreasonable workaround, I usually draft my TikZ diagrams in an online editor like WriteLaTeX, and copy-paste the finished diagrams into my documents. I'd like to have auto-refreshing documents offline, but I haven't found a tool that works with my environment (vim with a simple build script).
latexmk + your document viewer of choice (evince for me) will rebuild your document every time you save. Evince will automatically reload the new document. I use it with vim.
Moreover, the study only uses extremely small documents (with only a few mathematical equations) in their study. The power in TeX comes from defining project-wide macros and label management, allowing for instantaneous refactoring, tidy management of multiple versions of a document using imports and versioning, and seamless integration with whatever terminal tools you already use.
In other words, this paper's implied conclusions are short-sighted because TeX does much more than print the written word (or mathematical/tabular data). I would like to see the same study extended; make the same groups refactor a twenty page document, replacing one notation with another, reorganizing the sections, adding new figures, and reformatting the bibliography according to a different standard.