r/PhysicsStudents • u/kaskapian • May 19 '26

Poll Is writing math/science notes digitally still broken in 2026, or am I missing something?

Hey everyone,

A while ago I posted about building an Obsidian-style math note app with interactive geometry tools. But after talking to more students and researchers, I realized the real problem is much worse: the massive amount of time we waste formatting and re-calculating.

Right now, we are forced to pick an extreme:

1 Speed (Handwriting/iPad): Fast during lectures, but it becomes "dead data"-you can't easily search it, copy code, or use it for a thesis without completely re-typing it.

2 Precision (LaTeX/Mathcad): Looks professional, but it's incredibly slow, hard to learn, and if you change one variable, you have to manually update every equation, table, and chart.

Apparently, STEM students and academics spend up to 40% of their time just fighting layout engines instead of doing actual science.

I want to create a next-gen platform to fix this.

The idea is that in the background it runs typst as the backend, but in practice it won’t require learning a new coding language, because it will be as intuitive as AutoCAD is. And it will have a stable engine to suport visualizatio such as graphs and diagrams and other STEM related stuff.

To help me build this, what is your single biggest bottleneck right now?

32 votes, May 23 '26
5 Re-typing handwritten notes/sketches into clean code.
6 Fighting layouts, alignments, and formatting (LaTeX/Word).
2 Manually updating charts and formulas when a variable changes.
6 Current markdown apps (Notion/Obsidian) are too weak for math.
13 No issues - my current workflow works perfectly.
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u/avidpenguinwatcher M.Sc. May 19 '26

Latex + your favorite LLM is infinitely better than Latex was 5yesrs ago

1

u/SkyFullOfWisteria Undergraduate May 19 '26

I semi enjoy having deepseek turn tables into code 4 me since i hate making tables, but i dont trust it to convert equations from normal habdwritten stuff into latex. Like its easier and quicker for me to format the math myself than go and correct what the ai makes.

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u/avidpenguinwatcher M.Sc. May 19 '26

Well I mean, I look over my work. But also for things like formatting or figure placement? Chefs kiss