Academic publishing in the humanities

The main reason why the Arxiv preprint server has accumulated around 2 Mio papers is because of the LaTeX typesetting program. Other preprint servers like Socarxiv which are preferring MS-Word as default format have a lower submission rate. It might be an open problem if LateX is producing a higher typographic quality than other publishing tools, but what can be measured is, that authors who are using this software are confident that their paper is written very well. This makes it likely that LaTeX papers are submitted to an online only preprint server, while MS-Word generated documents never exit the local hard drive. This strange situation can be described in detail. What happens after the pdflatex compiler was applied to a document is, that the document is ready. The pdflatex compiler checks for possible overfull hboxes, wrong style sheets and correct referenced literature and if he doesn't found a mistake the resulting pdf file is created int he working directory. According to the pdflatex program this file is ready to publish. it was formatted with the most advanced typesetting software available which is used by thousands of other researchers worldwide. So there is no reason left why this document should be revised or formatted something else. Technically it is possible to reformat the pdf paper because the pdflatex program has done all the work. All what the author is allowed to do is to print it out or better, to submit it to a preprint server. Basically spoken, a latex first pipeline makes it easy to publishing something. Authors are encouraged to type in a manuscript and then they are encouraged to submit the document to a webserver. This is why the latex software was created. In contrast, possible alternative word processing software are not forcing such a mandatory behavior. A simple outline tool or a literature database was programmed to support a local user during his work. And publishing the results is not recommended. It doesn't make much sense to print out a “ work in progress” manuscript. The reason is that such draft file has to be reformatted before it can be published somehow in the future – maybe. Let us try to investigate the hypothesis, that the LaTeX community is overconfident about the quality of the generated pdf files. Suppose we are asking in one of the latex forums, if latex is superior to MS-Word. The answer is: yes it is. And if we are asking if a latex generated pdf document is ready to print it out or ready for uploading it to arxiv, then the answer is the same. It is pretty hard to find someone who explains that latex generated papers have a low quality and it is not recommended to publish them because they need to be formatted somehow else.