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LaTeX, Instantly: Extract LaTeX from PDFs or Handwritten Notes
- melling 7y agoIs there a recommended cloud or app solution that works well on the iPhone/iPad for writing a lot of LaTex?
- _ph_ 7y agoThere are several LaTex environments for iOS. I habe been using TexWriter, but very lightly so far. It worked well for me.
- throwlaplace 7y agoi've used this. it's a really good solution to an odd problem. how often do you need the latex from a paper or book or whatever instead of a screen cap? if you're going to fold it into your own writing then you'll just write it out yourself since most stuff isn't that complicated (and because ostensibly you know latex already). if you're not going to fold it in (and just use it in a powerpoint or something) then max-zoom+copypaste works fine. on the other hand if it could do tikz now that would be magical (but as well know that's much much harder).
- MayeulC 7y agoWell, this one is quite interesting, and would integrate nicely with tablet inputs for IDEs, but I have been burned often enough by non-free tools or SAAS (as well as the philosophy/ethics side) that I can't resolve to make closed-source and nonfree software part of my workflow. As a one-off, though? Maybe.
- nicodjimenez 7y agoMathpix Snip is free up to 50 images per month. Also, we are open sourcing our JS rendering stack very soon, which we hope will make publishing scientific content online more competitive with sharing PDF links.
- ssivark 7y agoFWIW, totally agreed with @MayeulC's comment (to the folks who might be willing to pay for this, the content is too damn important to risk platform lock-in. For this service to even get consideration, I would imagine that everything must be cleanly exportable, such that one needs only pay for continued use of the service). That said, where I would seek a tool that really adds value is auto-converting notes (text and math interspersed) into LaTeX, so that (as a value add) it can also be intelligently searched (coupled with an indexing+search solution). I think many academics/knowledge-workers might be open to paying for such a service. Bonus if you can work well off just smartphone photographs of pages.
- nicodjimenez 7y agoThe content generated from Mathpix Snip can be pasted into any Latex compatible editor, so that avoids the lock-in you sometimes get with proprietary WYSIWYG editors. Plus as I mentioned we'll be open sourcing our rendering engine soon. Thanks for the suggestion about adding search capabilities, we're thinking about this. If you curious about it, I would suggest to just sign up and try it. If you spend a lot of time typing up Latex it's definitely worth having, especially for matrices / aligned equations.
- oefrha 7y agoThe API pricing with 1000 free calls per month seems way more lenient than the free plan for end users. Are you worried about end users writing a simple script or downloading someone else’s simple script to sidestep your intended free quota?
- throwlaplace 7y agowhy do you ask for organization access with github oauth?
- mehrdadn 7y ago> non-free tools or SAAS (as well as the philosophy/ethics side) The philosophy half I get, but ethics? Any chance you could explain why paying for tools or services is unethical?
- miki123211 7y agoOh god. An app like that, with a full pdf to LaTeX file converter, would be a godsend for the blind community. We usually sturggle a lot with mathematics in PDF documents, as it's usually not accessible for screen readers at all. TeX isn't the most pleasant thing to listen to, but it's at least plain asci text that any screen reader can process.
- throwlaplace 7y agowell that's an interesting (tough) problem. it's made infinitely more difficult given how many different ways there are to read a typeset expression. are you blind mathematician? i have a related question: are you an algebraist or a geometer? are you good at mental arithmetic?
- nicodjimenez 7y agoHey, Mathpix founder here. I'm doing some research on how we can do just that, would love to chat if you're up for it, please ping me nico@mathpix.com.
- app4soft 7y agoCould you provide AppImage for Linux? Really bored with Snap/snapd.[0] [0] https://snapcraft.io/mathpix-snipping-tool https://snapcraft.io/mathpix-snipping-tool
- georgewsinger 7y agoThis is a 1-liner in Wolfram Programming Language: ‘Speak[SpokenString[ToExpression[texExpression, TeXForm]]]’, for ‘texExpression’ an arbitrary TeX formula. See https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/SpokenString.html https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/SpokenString.html I’ve been looking for a way to convert math texts to audiobooks, but haven’t actually implemented anything.
- throwlaplace 7y agonow that's cool
- devwastaken 7y agoI've been looking for an open source solution to take drawn math and convert to text. I don't know if this is it but we certainly need more of it. Windows comes with one I don't remember the name of, but I'd rather like to have a simple web browser canvas or webgl that could be drawn using a pen on a smartphone.
- oefrha 7y agoLast I looked into open source LaTeX OCR, albeit two or three years ago, the landscape was hardly different from this 2010 answer: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/1476 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/1476 i.e. pretty sad. (This is not it because it’s a SaaS product.) Edit: Also, on the commercial side, I’ve used several MyScript products. They’re decent, but not amazing.
- throwlaplace 7y ago>Windows comes with one I don't remember the name of math input panel (or integrated into one note). i bought a tablet just for this but it ends up being not good enough to be super useful. i think it's quite a tough task for something like an RNN.
- max_likelihood 7y agoJust curious if there is any plan for the Mathpix OCR/engine to transcribe tablet notes in real-time to a LaTeX document? That would be the holy grail for me.
- nicodjimenez 7y agoYes we're looking at this. What type of tablet do you own?
- max_likelihood 7y agoCurrently I'm not using a tablet. But, I'm doing an M.S. in Actuarial Science. With > 90% of my notes being formulas, I would buy a tablet just for this feature :)
- ptman 7y agoRemarkable?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- j88439h84 7y agoAndroid on Boox note pro
- arbie 7y agoThis could blow Nebo out of the water.
- sokoloff 7y agoI enjoyed the Isaac Newton "testimonial" (the others as well, but that one was the first I read).
- meanmrmustard92 7y agoThey recently implemented a pretty restrictive freemium subscription model that has tempered my enthusiasm for it massively. 50 snips a month is nothing for grad students.
- Silhouette 7y agoIf grad students in relevant fields aren't one of the main target markets for this kind of product, where do you think they're going to make their money?
- nicodjimenez 7y agoDo you think 100 free Snips per month would be better? We're thinking about how to do a student plan.
- danmg 7y agoGrad students will just just maple/mathematica to directly generate latex from an expression.
- jefft255 7y agoWhich grad students? In CS the use of these is long gone (at least in the two departments I’ve been in). I wonder how prevalent they still are in physics. But I’m pretty damn sure that physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists all just type their equations straight into latex unless it’s a super complicated computer generated formula, which you don’t typically write in papers..
- ttul 7y agoHow are they supposed to pay themselves in that case? It’s an incredible service.
- scarmig 7y ago4.99/month for unlimited snips isn't exactly onerous. Grad students are known to be able to afford Netflix and Spotify.
- dvt 7y agoFYI, I'm pretty sure this is wrong: \ell ( \theta ) = \sum _ { i = 1} ^ { m } \operatorname{log} p ( x ; \theta ) Given that we're summing over i = 1 to m (in the picture), I think that's supposed to be x_i :) Impressive, nonetheless.
- smsx 7y agoThis doesn't seem to support Wayland? Trying to create a snippet corrupts my whole screen. If I can get it to work, it seems quite useful. This is what I get when trying to capture an image: https://cdn.mathpix.com/snip/images/OvK0viJ9Q4k4evoCpnfvtIFlyZA9n4W43tIysMr0LjI.original.fullsize.png https://cdn.mathpix.com/snip/images/OvK0viJ9Q4k4evoCpnfvtIFl...
- nicodjimenez 7y agoHi, no we do not support Wayland. You can, however, try pasting images directly into our notes app snip.mathpix.com by copying the image to your clipboard and then pasting directly into the document.
- PureParadigm 7y agoI used to think converting from handwriting to LaTeX would be a really useful program and save a lot of time, but after typing LaTeX on a regular basis, the input speed is really not an issue. Sometimes I'll encounter a symbol I don't know, and then I draw it in here [1] and remember it for next time. When doing math, it's definitely not the bottleneck in getting my work done. I would definitely be slower with handwriting conversion, especially when you factor in fixing errors in its translation. I only see handwriting conversion being useful as training wheels for beginners, but would be interested if someone has a different experience. Automatic recognition from PDFs is more promising for accessibility and reformatting, and also seems to be easier to do since typeset math is easier to recognize than handwriting. [1] http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
- grzm 7y agoIf you’re not at a keyboard, or prefer to use a stylus, typing really isn’t an option. Or if you want to capture the actual working-through of a problem, rather than working from an already-completed work. There are a number of use cases you might not find useful with respect to handwriting, but others might find incredibly practical.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoI am comfortable enough with latex that I often work through problems on latex. For certain cases, with long expressions, it is actually simpler than handwriting, because I can copy an equation onto the next line and edit it in-place, hence, taking less time and ensuring I am not missing terms. I have a friend who got so into latex that a few times he would mindlessly use latex code while handwriting things, like writing "\alpha" on the board instead of drawing the greek alphabet.
- nathell 7y agoI wonder if it could be (ab)used to LaTeX-ize plain TeX.
- thedudeabides5 7y agoHas anyone on this thread actually used this? Would be interested in a product review
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Iwan-Zotow 7y agothere is also https://github.com/falvaro/seshat https://github.com/falvaro/seshat
- gammarator 7y agoI used this recently as part of a literature review I was doing. Worked amazingly well and sped my work up substantially. Highly recommended.
- 16yoMLDev 7y agoI actually worked on transcribing math expressions to latex a few months ago with a Resnet backbone + LSTM + Attention. All my code to train the model is available On GitHub: https://github.com/bkkaggle/math-recognition https://github.com/bkkaggle/math-recognition If anyone wants to chat about math expression OCR, I'd love to talk about it! It's a surprisingly difficult and interesting (and under appreciated and unknown) area of research!
- heinrichf 7y ago@nicodjimenez Could you give the HN audience a quick idea of the technology behind this? Recurrent ConvNets like in https://guillaumegenthial.github.io/image-to-latex.html https://guillaumegenthial.github.io/image-to-latex.html ? I remember seeing an "image to LaTeX" academic challenge, do you plan competing in it, if it still exists?
- ygra 7y agoJust one note: Ctrl+Alt+M is a horrible choice of shortcut, as it conflicts with typing characters on many keyboard layouts. μ on my keyboard, for example. Ctrl+Alt is identical to AltGr and thus should be avoided for shortcuts in general.
- kait_m_cunn 7y agoYou can record the shortcut to be whatever you'd like in your settings :)