That's a good argument. However, Quarkdown is still a strict upgrade over typing latex directly or whatever, and you get more predictable results and better compatibility with LLM-assisted editing than with a GUI editor like Word.
Why did you not have an LLM typeset it for you in 1% of the time that it took for you to type all of it out by hand? Did you ride a horse to university instead of taking your car as well?
Are you suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses? Or just writing LaTeX commands while the students write the core text? Because if it's the latter, LaTeX usually isn't the bottleneck.
No, I am not suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses. The original poster implied that they typed latex code for their thesis out by hand, to which I responded that it seemed silly to do so, silly in a similar way that taking a horse drawn carriage would be vs using a car.
So, do they write their formulas like S a b f(x)dx in their hand-written source text, but then get the LLM to convert that to \int_{a}^{b}f(x)dx? Invent their own "markup" to indicate S a b is the integral from a to b? They might as well learn \int and just use that.
I write LaTeX by hand all the time whenever I need to put any math in my notes, and depending on your use-case or field, you learn the LaTeX for that which you use often and it's faster than trying to use most tools.
