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I am currently writing my bachelor's thesis about symbol recognition. In my introduction, I have the sentence

[LaTeX] offers to many people the possibility not only to create texts themselves, but also make them look beautiful without knowledge of typesetting algorithms.

My advisor thinks I should remove / change "beautiful" because it is subjective.

I think the statement itself is true (comparing the output of some example texts of OpenOffice and LaTeX) and I am sure one can objectively measure it (number of widows and orphans, word breaks, grey-value of an image, inter- and intra-word spacing, and eventually even more).

Do you know if some studies were made that compare (La)TeX with OpenOffice Word / Microsoft Word / something else?

(Don't get me wrong: If there are studys that compare (La)TeX with something else that show that there is a better option, I am interested in it, too.)

Martin Thoma
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    I would consult Bringhurst's book "Elements of Typographic Style" (I hope I remembered it correctly). While he doesn't plug LaTeX or any other product, he provides concepts and quantitative distinctions on what makes good vs. bad typography. Whether he uses the word "beautiful", I do not recall, but I am thinking (extemporaneously) that you should be able to make the argument that LaTeX satisfies many criteria ignored by other typesetting methods. – Steven B. Segletes Nov 03 '14 at 19:14
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    I think your advisor is right at the limit but only at the limit. Convention is often confused with beauty however we are so used to it we can't think otherwise. I wouldn't object to it but if he insists then replace it with professional. – percusse Nov 03 '14 at 19:21
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    I think beautiful is indeed a subjective word. Personally, I'd suggest you to go after ergonomy and some sort of pleasant feeling towards reading a material produced with LaTeX in comparison to another similar output. In the worst scenario, you might need to create your own control group and evaluate the feedback. Also, an important note: beware of font impact, this could surely be misleading. :) – Paulo Cereda Nov 03 '14 at 19:21
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    I doubt it. For one thing much of latex typesetting isn't beautiful by any definition of beauty that "the man in the street" would recognize. Especially in earlier years when there were less fonts available and more or less everyone used standard article with computer modern, latex typesetting really aspired to high standards in legibility, typography, and archival usefulness, but boring, very conventional American (rather than European) influenced design, rather than beauty would be the main design aim. I'd change "make them look beautiful" to "typeset them to a high standard" – David Carlisle Nov 03 '14 at 19:33
  • I agree with your advisor, but you could certainly change this to a more objective statement along the lines of "... but also incorporate advanced typographic features with minimal effort and little or no knowledge of the underlying details or algorithms". – erik Nov 03 '14 at 20:06
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    You're evoking Robert Bringhurst. His work inspired André Miede who built classicthesis template for Latex. Maybe could you find something in that direction. If your question is about aesthetics, it's possible to search some criterias in Kant's works and especially in The critic of judgment. You'll find some specific criterias to define what is beautiful. And one among some of his criterias is that you contemplate a master work only if you can see in it something such as a mere nature, not the product of man art. Is this not the case of any Latex page ? Take also a look at Tufte's Works. – domi Nov 03 '14 at 20:39
  • Not an answer to you question, just a comment!: I would agree with your supervisor. You might better to resort to more measurable aspect of LaTeX. Don't get me wrong. I do know what you mean by beautiful and I do agree you. However, it is also true what David has stated as well as fair comment of your supervisor. With that said, to shed some light on what you mean by beauty, I suggest to generate same text both with LaTeX and [e.g.] MSWord, put them side by side and let the readers judge. – Pouya Nov 03 '14 at 21:21
  • Wow, that is a lot of feedback! Thank you all!

    @Pouya: It is just a comment in the introduction that is only very loosely related to the later parts. Adding an example for readers would be too much.

    DavidCarlisle and percusse: Thank you! That is a good idea. (Side note: I already mentioned both of you and this side in the acknowledgment :-) )

     – Martin Thoma Nov 03 '14 at 21:44
  • Knuth designed TeX to produce "beautiful books" as he says in his book "3:16" and other places. LaTeX had different purposes, with its strengths being more in the consistency, standardization, and clarity of structure required in academic publication. – musarithmia Nov 03 '14 at 22:58
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    See also http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends – John Kormylo Nov 04 '14 at 01:33
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    Note that consistency and clarity are likely to be significant factors influencing human perceptions of beauty regardless of whether you think aesthetic value objective. (People are banding about the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' as if these had clear, unambiguous meanings themselves. They don't. Unless the intended meaning of 'subjective' is specified, the claim that beauty is (entirely? partly?) subjective is impossible to assess, as is the claim that it is 'objective'. It would be very surprising if nothing measurable was implicated in our judgements of beauty, for example.) – cfr Nov 04 '14 at 02:29
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    Using beautiful might be subjective, but as far as i remember, it was Knuth's goal to produce beautiful documents with TeX. My advice, find the quote and cite him. – Johannes_B Nov 04 '14 at 07:18
  • Related: The Beauty of LATEX – Martin Thoma Dec 18 '14 at 20:12
  • Related: An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development by Markus Knauff, Jelica Nejasmic – Martin Thoma Jan 18 '16 at 14:46

1 Answers1

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To answer your question about studies: As far as I know there are no studies.

Instead of "beautiful" (beautiful is not objective indeed) I would say that LaTeX has a build-in typography which is based on the rules used by printing companies. That results in a layout of the printed document that is different to the "usual" Word looking documents.

onewhaleid
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Mensch
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  • "LaTeX has a build-in typography which based on the rules used by the printing companys". With all due respect dear Kurt, I think that statement, somehow, bring downs the whole awesomeness of LaTex that OP is trying to emphasize on. – Pouya Nov 03 '14 at 22:34
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    @Pouya My english is not very good so there is a chance that I missunderstood something. But I'm teaching MS Word and LaTeX for students. If you use without extras the document class article, report, book or for german language for example scrartcl, scrrprt or scrbook you get an result you can't reach with Word (even if you work hard) because Word has a bad (build in) justifiying but LaTeX not. Students do not want to learn one year typography to get better looking word documents. With LaTeX you can concentrate to write a good content and get the good (build in) typography of LaTeX. – Mensch Nov 04 '14 at 12:06