Comment by sondr3

I had an amusing incident that was related, quite some years back as a CS undergrad. One prof had quite poor eyesight, so had a no-pencil rule for assignments. Typed was OK, neat pen was fine also. (My writing has always been atrocious, typed it is.) As it happened, I used LaTeX (and I knew she did also.)

She also had a rule about promptness of assignment delivery, meaning the start of class when she arrived. Fair enough!

On this one assignment, I had done all but the last question at home, and printed it off, with the hope that I could finish it at the lab and send it to a laser printer in another building. At the time, labs used shared, dot-matrix printers that were usually jammed. I got the last question done, sent it to the printer, then checked the queue. Apparently someone was printing a book, not going to get done before class.

I emailed her my .tex file, with the explanation that I'd hand in my incomplete printout in class, but would appreciate if she could mark the last section so I knew how I did. This was sent well before class, as the timestamp would show. The prof ended up printing, marking, and returning this version, and I received full marks!

Very much this. In fact, I had made a note about earning "professor points", in my (giant) blog post [0] describing my org-mode use...

   6. Professor Points: I also get intermediate tex output for free,
      which I don't need, but may please you if you are a professor
      (or said professor's hopelessly sleep derived grad students).

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[0] Discussed here recently:

  Why and How I use “Org Mode” for my writing and more (2022) (evalapply.org)
  217 points by sebg | 6 months ago | 64 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157672

Kudos to you, my biggest regret nowadays was not learning how to use orgmode (and org-roam) in college. As long as you set up a proper environment and have an org-publish config you barely need to bother with verbose LaTeX documents.

https://www.orgroam.com/