[vamin]

Lots of comments pointing out how obvious it is that the paper was not typeset with real LaTeX, but I think that's a little beside the point. Scott isn't arguing that it looks 100% as good as LaTeX. The article cites research that suggests that writing in LaTeX hurts productivity, even for expert users:

We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users

[pseudonom-]

I think that paper came up on HN before and IIRC the tasks they were measuring were things like manually positioning some figure in an arbitrary position. This is not a use case LaTeX optimizes for or one that comes up often in my experience.

Edit: See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002 for an earlier discussion of the referenced paper.

[coldacid]

Not to mention that this is geared toward people who write papers with a minimum of equations. Unless a paper is math-heavy, it probably doesn't need the typesetting that TeX offers.