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Handwriting to LaTeX maths
- ique 15y agoThis works surprisingly well! It even made my crappy writing into the correct markup. Great for when you have a big equation to "translate" to LaTeX quickly or to just look up a character you don't know the name of. I wish there was a function to upload an image or to capture an image via webcam or something like that. Then I could write it on paper and show it to the webcam and get the markup, or upload scans of notes to have them translated.
- kmfrk 15y agoYeah, they could easily create a separate pastebin-like business for equations. It would do miracles for homework assistance and teletutoring. Especially if they let people embed the code. EDIT: You could even add a business model that made the posts auto-delete after a month where premium users could keep their pastes up forever and embed them. Infinite possibilities.
- jessriedel 15y ago> or to just look up a character you don't know the name of. There's Detexify for that: detexify.kirelabs.org/
- randomdata 15y agoOn my first attempt, I couldn't even make out what I had drawn, but this service inferred my intent anyway. Amazing.
- lignuist 15y agoAwesome! I really hope, someone comes up with a pdf2tex tool, that handles formulas well. Edit: is even more fun on a tablet.
- acharekar 15y ago+1 This works amazingly well. Brilliant !
- ajuc 15y agoIt just works. I've thought it will sometimes work. And it just works. Brilliant.
- sachdevaprash 15y agohttp://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html Found this ages back. It suggests options and not just one result. Works better.
- lignuist 15y agoWorks only for single symbols, but not for complex formulas.
- sachdevaprash 15y agoOh. Good point. Yeah Web Equation does better in that regard. But I think its good to give some alternatives as well. Just in case it gets it wrong sometimes.
- chalst 15y agoThey are different. Detexify is really useful, since it matches against a vry large symbol set, and is trained against a pretty large sample set. For symbol recognition, this app is pretty crude. It's still cool, but I struggle to think of a use case for it. It's too unreliable to be of use for scanning maths notes.
- albertzeyer 15y agoSeems to work very well. I wonder about the technics they use. I asked about exactly this a while ago here: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2097/ocr-lib-for-math-formulas http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2097/ocr-lib-for-math-f... The answers at that point were quite limited. The Tesseract OCR engine was just not made to recognize such structure. There are some other closed solutions, though.
- rubidium 15y ago!FINALLY! I'm very happy with this. The recognition is much better than the other similar things I've tried. By my limited testing, it seems to be accounting for the image as a whole and not the order of strokes, so should work for uploads. A couple desired improvements: -Allow uploading of images -add an eraser/undo -some Greek/Hebrew letters (aleph, beth, xi... ) aren't being recognized despite my tries... they've very similar to X's, equivilant, and ='s. Beth really should work, but isn't.
- pooriaazimi 15y agoThere is an 'undo' button at the top-left. Though sometimes it didn't register touches on my iPad.
- rubidium 15y agoah, sure enough. I limit my suggestion to an eraser then.
- MichaelJW 15y agoTheir Web Shape demo (http://webdemo.visionobjects.com/shape.html?locale=default# http://webdemo.visionobjects.com/shape.html?locale=default#) lets you "scratch out" objects - perhaps they could implement that here? It's what I usually do when writing equations quickly, anyway.
- linuxlizard 15y agoAmazing. So much fun, so useful. Will be using this in future homework assignments!
- muyuu 15y agoVery nice. Always thought the stylus interface had a lot of upsides and this is yet another one. Looking forward to more devices supporting both fingers and stylus, like the Flyer or the Galaxy Note.
- deisner 15y agoI had an idea for a mobile app where you'd take a photo of a legal pad full of handwritten text and equations, and the app would generate a latex document or a PDF. Maybe this is possible now?
- gus_massa 15y agoThis is incredible good. But some formulas doesn't work (for example: $\sqrt[3]{2}$) and I can't find a feedback / suggests a better translation button.
- jen_h 15y agoSo. Awesome. And it works on my phone -- very sweet. My only quibble is that I couldn't get it to hack me up a per mille (this was the #1 question I used to get working as LaTeX support for a journal publisher years back).
- pooriaazimi 15y agoI didn't know 'per mil' had a sign! 'Per mil' is one tenth of a percent(%), so 1% = 10‰. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mil
- jen_h 15y agoThere's a package, wasysym, which gives you \permil, but I always just cheated with \%_o. Doesn't look very pretty, though. :)
- bdg 15y agoThis was interesting. I've recently been using latex to write math equations down but this might save me a lot of time (one I dig my drawing tablet out of the closet). I'd be more interested in a write-up of how you made it more successful than previous attempts however, technologies used, etc.
- fdej 15y agoIt did -\int _{-\infty }^{\infty }\dfrac {\cos \left( \pi t+\beta \right) ^{2}} {e^{t^{2}}}dt=F\left( \beta \right) I'm impressed.
- gjulianm 15y agoGreat! But it does not recognise matrixes. Matrixes are the hardest thing to write in LaTeX, it would be wonderful to write them by hand and then having the LaTeX code without problems.
- gpakosz 15y agoIndeed, we don't support matrices yet but this is a feature we're currently adding, no eta though.
- drucken 15y agoImpressive. It seems to work a lot better than Microsoft's Math Input Panel bundled with Windows 7! Though its not perfect: http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg820/scaled.php?server=820&filename=xfxdxmath.jpg&res=medium http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg820/scaled.php?server=820&#...
- mohene1 15y agoSuperwork! Hugs!
- kmfrk 15y agoI just noticed that they even have a free app in the App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myscript-memo/id446368116 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myscript-memo/id446368116.
- dfan 15y agoThat's pretty brilliant. I do wish I could edit the generated LaTeX in place to give it hints when it's gotten something slightly wrong. I wonder if it has any contextual smarts (e.g., sees a partial derivative sign in a numerator, knows it should "vote up" interpretations of the denominator that start with another partial derivative sign).
- jrockway 15y agoI always dreamed of having a tablet that could do this when I was taking math in college. Where's the code?
- johno215 15y agoVery impressive! The only issue I've run into is it having trouble discerning lower-case and upper-case letters. Training with my own writing style should be able to correct this however. Is there a plan to offer this as a non-web-browser service? I would love to be able to write math out on paper, or a resistive screen tablet, and then import it into a LaTeX document. I am faster writing equations by hand than typing LaTeX (and definitely faster compared to using a WYSIWYG equation program). Edit: By the way, this is the perfect example of a problem I've always wished a start-up would come along and solve for me.
- keithpeter 15y agoJust used this on an interactive whiteboard in front of a class for basic algebra. Very nice indeed, well done sir. How about image save for the rendered formula? I could copy/paste straight into Word for a nice homework exercise. Basically education lower down the system could use this, not just University level.
- euccastro 15y agoFunny glitch: draw an alpha, get \alpha. Then draw a beta and gamma to the right, without touching or overlapping the alpha, and I get \propto \beta \gamma. I've found it shuns greek letters in general. I get an `x' from by best attepmts at \lambda. Really impressive and useful, nonetheless.
- rafeed 15y agoThis is fantastic! It's actually more robust than I thought it was going to be.
- cottonseed 15y agoThis is pretty cool, although it doesn't seem very efficient if you goal is to write TeX. It would be interesting see how well it works to OCR hand-written notes or old-timey typewritten (that is, typed on a typewriter) math manuscripts where the mathematical symbols written in afterwards by hand...
- gpakosz 15y agoHi folks, A small note on what we don't support yet: no cube roots, no nth roots either square root's top line must be a single line (make it wide enough up front) no matrices no system of equations no corrections, no scratch out (use top left undo/redo arrows) leave enough space between integral/summation symbols and main expression for better accuracy LaTeX output pleases MathJax as much as possible (thank you guys for your lovely rendering library) Hope that helps, Thank you for trying it out. PS: MathML seems to get little attention, why is it so? --- LIST OF SUPPORTED SYMBOLS (encoded in UTF-8) --- Letters a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Digits 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Maths symbols € $ £ ¥ ₩ ¢ ( ) < > [ ] { } ! # % & ? @ / \ | ∥ © ∂∅ ∇ ∞ ℂ ℕ ℚ ℝ ℤ + - ± × ÷ * ∘ · = ' , . : ; _ ← ↑ → ↓ ↔ ↕ ↖ ↗ ↘ ↙ ⇐ ⇑ ⇒ ⇓ ⇔ ⇕ ∀ ∃ ∄ ∈ ∉ ∋ ∌ ∩ ∪ ⊂ ⊃ ⊄ ⊅ ∼ ≃ ≠ ≡ ≢ ≤ ≥ ≪ ≫ ∝ ∠ ∏ ∑ ∫∮∧ √ Greek symbols Γ Δ Ω α β γ δ ε η θ λ ν π ρ σ τ φ χ ψ ω ϕ µ International convention units (with cursive support) km hm dam dm cm mm µm ha hl dal dl cl ml µl kg hg dag dg cg mg µg ms µs GHz MHz kHz Hz Other mathematical terms (with cursive support) sin cos tan sinh cosh tanh arcsin arccos arctan cot coth min max arg argmin argmax inf sup lim liminf limsup ln log dx dy dz dt
- robertskmiles 15y agoIt doesn't support '⊂'. It supports 'c' and 'C', but not '⊂'. Edit: It's amazing work by the way, but distinguishing those definitely needs more training.
- gpakosz 15y agoWriting '⊂' alone would likely be recognized as 'c' or 'C' because the decision is based on the context. 'A ⊂ B' is unkikely going to be recognized as 'A c B' or 'A C B'
- rsaarelm 15y agoLooks like it knows it's supposed to print "sin" and "cos" in non-italic text, but not the 'd' in \int x d x. Extremely neat in any case.
- alexchamberlain 15y agoI'd happily pay for an Android note taking app that integrated this.
- backprojection 15y agoI'd pay good money for it
- sprash 15y agoI did not manage to get $\xi$ working.
- baltcode 15y agoYou guys have got to integrate this with teachontablo or something similar. That would be simply awesome.
- kamens 15y agoThis is the piece we (Khan Academy) need to create a compelling math exercise experience on tablets. Playing around for a few minutes, this product seems to be way ahead of anything else out there. If you're the creator, should I go through the contact us stuff on your website, or is there a better way of discussing possibilities with you? (edited: @gpakosz contacted me on twitter)
- PieSquared 15y agoHey! I've been daydreaming of making this application for years now. It would be the killer application for tablets (for me, anyways). I'm an Android developer, so if there's any way I can help out, or if there's any way I can make it happen faster, please let me know! (email in user profile. I'm really really hoping I can help out somehow.)
- kamens 15y agoCool. Just emailed you.
- profquail 15y agoI saw another app like this (probably here on HN) a while back...it's an open-source Haskell project: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html EDIT: GitHub sources: https://github.com/kirel/detexify https://github.com/kirel/detexify https://github.com/kirel/detexify-hs-backend https://github.com/kirel/detexify-hs-backend
- apathy 15y agoThe version of Detexify for the iPhone is friggin' awesome. I remember once upon a time it was faster for me to write out an equation than to typeset it. Then I met detexify and Mathematica. Both are brilliant, one is free :-)
- shocks 15y agoFantastic work, very excited by this. A "learning" technique would be cool, if I could correct things and the system would learn over time.
- jonnycowboy 15y agoIs this 100% embedded in javascript? Is the code available un-obfuscated somewhere? thanks!
- mathieuruellan 15y agoNo. The client requests a server (Jetty). The server uses our SDK with the Java version.
- gpakosz 15y agothe tech is implemented in native code, runs everywhere from tablets (iOS, android) to desktops (windows, mac, linux) as Mathieu mentioned, the backend of this demo is done in Java which talks to our native code through JNI
- sbanach 15y agoTry this (free) iPad app. Also contains a numerical solver: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gridpaper/id385633188?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gridpaper/id385633188?mt=8
- ylem 15y agoVery Cool!!!!!
- ylem 15y agoThis is extremely cool! I could see using this to generate input for a paper--but a mouse is not the best input device--I'll have to test this on a tablet later--but, even with a mouse, the results were impressive (no hbar yet?)
- mattbot5000 15y agoWas anyone able to get fractional exponents to work? I tried several different ways of writing it and had no success.
- arandomJohn 15y agoOh wow. This would make my iPad math game so much better. I already have handwriting, just no handwriting recognition... http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/math-battle/id476344792?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/math-battle/id476344792?mt=8
- impendia 15y agoIf you got this to the point where you could scan a document and have it spit out latex code for the whole thing, you would have... ... a huge success on your hand. EVERY mathematician I know, most certainly including myself, would use it constantly. I have pages and pages of disorganized handwritten notes. Since this is a forum for startup founders, put it this way: such a scanner would be of more use to mathematicians than, say, the sum total of Elsevier's output, and their latest financials show annual operating profit in the ten figures. FOSS would of course be even cooler (IMHO). But, food for thought... :)
- SudarshanP 15y agoThey rely on analysing your strokes. So images cannot be used .
- BHSPitMonkey 15y agoThis would be great, however, with one of those smart pen/pad combos that digitally transcribe whatever you're writing/drawing on paper.
- drewda 15y agoSee also Enventra, works with Excel, Mathematica, and Maple: http://www.enventra.com/ http://www.enventra.com/
- pusha 15y agoGreat work! Everyone else is thinking "this + wolfram alpha" == algebra / math analysis problem solver for ipad?
- rdl 15y agoThis would have made university so much more fun.
- toppy 15y agoI'm not sure who do you address with this application. That's how real math looks like: https://nrich.maths.org/discus/messages/117730/117502.jpg https://nrich.maths.org/discus/messages/117730/117502.jpg
- lurker14 15y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630233 "Windows 7 Ink Input and Math Handwriting Recognition" Nice to see a version on the web. Weird to the web cloning naive software on a few years delay.