Many attempts were made in the past to compare the LaTeX engine with possible alternatives like MS Word. In most cases, LaTeX advocates are promising, that their typesetting software has a higher typographic quality. This kind of judgment is subjective because it hides the criteria why a certain layout is better.
The underlying reason why LaTeX is the superior rendering engine is its ability to create long winded text. Hard to read text without any images and sections is generated with the TeX engine easily. Here is an example:
The only thing what is sure is, that such a text is the opposite of accessible typography. It doesn't of any pictures and all the text lines are looking the same. LaTeX makes it easy to create such typography. To emphasize the situation, I have reduced the line spacing to 0.95 that means the vertical space between the lines is lower than normal which makes the text even harder to grasp.
To understand the content the reader has to go through the text line by line. It is much harder than watching Television or reading a comic but the task of acquiring the knowledge from the text is hard work. This makes the layout perfect for a scientific paper. The only thing what is missing in the document are some footnotes and non english vocabulary which will increase the reading difficulty further. In other words, academic publishing is mostly about creating in accessible content.
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