- Russ Roberts interviews Josh Angrist, king of causality
- Does LaTeX lead to more paper errors than R? (I prefer LyX) (Hat tip to Development Impact blog for the last two)
- AEJ Applied has an astonishingly good special issue devoted to microfinance
- How to avoid sexism in academia, when writing recommendation letters
- The dog that played Toto in The Wizard of Oz was paid a salary higher than the actors who played the Munchkins
- “I’ll have the tabby”: A cafe in NYC allows you to cuddle with house cats
Presentation to the Joint Chiefs Operations Directorate
November 11, 2022
5 Responses
I do it Adam’s way: I usually rough our the in a word processor – other than WORD – then paste the text into LyX for the finished product.
Also, while I agree that beamer produces nice looking presentations, I normally don’t use it except when I have presentations with enough math to make it worth the hassle. (This has happened once, btw.) I follow Lane Kenworthy’s advice on this. I create the presentation in a work processor, pasting in the needed stuff and wrapping the text around it. I then export the whole business as a pdf file and use SKIM, a great presentation tool, to present. The word processor is always more flexible then any presentation app and a lot easier to use too.
LyX is a LaTeX editor. The study would consider regular LyX users “LaTeX experts”.
This is my big beef with the study. It focuses on word-processing metrics: spellchecking, speed of writing, ease of use. Obviously Word is a better word processor than LaTeX: LaTeX isn’t a word processor.
They don’t discuss a winning strategy: write with a word processor, then copy/paste into LyX and format.
Next up, they should compare LaTeX with Excel. I wonder which is better at summing up values in a spreadsheet? ;)
Papers and presentations prepared with Latex (or Lyx, or SWP) are more beautiful than papers and presentations prepared with Word and PPT. However, working with Latex takes longer (unless you have lots of equations) and beamer is sometimes a nightmare.
Moreover, Word helps a little with style and grammar and it’s better at spellchecking. On average, I find that students write better when they use Word (if anything, they have fewer typos). The PLOS one article seems to confirm my impression that LATEX is inefficient.
Given that beauty should not matter much (if a paper is good, it will eventually get published and the original typesetting will not matter), the main reason for using Latex is signaling. Robert Hall wrote: “There is a separating equilibrium between researchers who put out nicely typeset papers in Latex and those who struggle with the infirmities of Microsoft Word…. The same issue arises with slides. Nice clean slides in Beamer give your work a much more professional air than does anything in PowerPoint.”
But, isn’t this an incredibly inefficient way of signaling competence?
Links I liked: Russ Roberts interviews Josh Angrist, king of causality Does LaTeX lead to more paper errors th… http://t.co/8gHaF89Pmu
I’m sure you meant Word, not R