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Show HN: Convert screenshots of equations to LaTeX

456 pointsby slbenficaabout 7 years ago

36 comments

brownbatabout 7 years ago
Immediately made me think of a question on the state of handwriting to LaTeX from a few years ago, and all the massive challenges involved:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1443&#x2F;what-is-the-status-of-generating-latex-from-handwriting-i-e-ocr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1443&#x2F;what-is-the-sta...</a><p>Under API... you&#x27;re already doing handwriting? This is uh, nontrivial work to say the least. Really impressive.<p>The endorsements are a nice touch. :)<p>Made me really curious how far the system goes, what cases break it.<p>Oh... nevermind. You have a PDF of examples here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.mathpix.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.mathpix.com</a><p>It&#x27;s honing in on equations without getting distracted by nearby Hanzi or Cyrillic, or even pictures of dogs. Wow.<p>I keep going back to dig through your resources and getting more impressed.<p>EDIT: I guess my only constructive criticism is that you should brag more. I like a simple landing page, but I think you&#x27;ve earned a short list of examples of corner cases you tackle well, if the whole API is packed into that free app, because they&#x27;re really impressive.
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sinababout 7 years ago
This is really awesome OP! Thank you for sharing :)<p>One note I should make: it was not entirely clear (to me) upon a cursory view of the website, that the purpose of mathpix was to convert handwritten text into LaTeX. For some reason (maybe my coffee hasn&#x27;t kicked in yet) I thought this was strictly intended to take screenshots of equations on an existing pdf document or a website etc and that will be converted to LaTeX.<p>My thought at that point was &quot;I wonder if they could do this for handwritten text&quot; and then I looked at the docs and facepalmed..
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CJeffersonabout 7 years ago
Stupid question, how well would this work on a PDF of a latex document?<p>This would be great for blind people, as pdfed latex is extremely non-accessable, and I have to email authors of papers to get the original latex from them, which is often lost.
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jimnotgymabout 7 years ago
Im curious if the developers are fans of The Big Bang Theory TV series? They were using a smart phone app...and of course was less useful due to it being fiction...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk&#x2F;view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=big-bang-theory&amp;episode=s04e12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk&#x2F;view_episode_script...</a>
saganusabout 7 years ago
Wow!<p>What kind of sorcery is this!?<p>Is this using deep learning or &quot;regular&quot; OpenCV or similar?<p>I would assume it&#x27;s a highly tuned deep learning algo, but I&#x27;m not knowledgeable enough to distinguish a deep learning algo from a pile of rocks...<p>Edit: Aha, someone already asked this and got an answer.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16535467" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16535467</a>
typonabout 7 years ago
Suggestion: instead of making me download a pdf to see examples of what the results look like, maybe put them on the page directly. You can have a couple. Then put the details in the pdf.<p>Great software otherwise
bagrowabout 7 years ago
This is fantastic!!<p>Bug report: it appears that multiline summation subscripts are not recognized correctly. For example, Eq. 8 of [1]. These are often created using \substack as part of amsmath.<p>Awesome tool!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1802.01194.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1802.01194.pdf</a>
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sitkackabout 7 years ago
I assume you just got a lot of installs from India, because the large publishing houses contract out many re-typesetting jobs that are basically to take scans of technical texts and convert them back into LaTeX.<p>I strongly suggest you talk to the publishers about integrating your tech into their TeX.
RhysUabout 7 years ago
Want a math-ish PDF and some LaTeX source for training on possible edge cases? Think I might get someone (or something) to read my dissertation this way...
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lowglowabout 7 years ago
This is awesome work. What&#x27;s the process of vision -&gt; latex conversion?
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Uninenabout 7 years ago
I really appeciate the testimonials. All software deserves personality and a soul like this!
lliiffeeabout 7 years ago
Any way you could make this available outside the Mac App store? Apple seems to have decided I did something horrible and unforgivable by moving to a different country after creating an account, thus making it impossible for me to use the store.
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Ninnabout 7 years ago
Awesome! Is the plan for it to be free forever, or what might the pricing look like? Maybe you would consider open sourcing the model?<p>Also it would be nice of some info on the process. Does work entirely locally, or is images uploaded to the cloud?
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simonramstedtabout 7 years ago
We used their API to make a simple screenshot2latex tool (select screen region -&gt; puts latex formula in clipboard). From my experience it still fails on a couple of fairly common things like:<p>- \mathcal letters (recognized as non-mathcal)<p>- long equations (not recognized at all)<p>- multi-line equations (not recognized at all)<p>The screenshot2latex tool: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rmst&#x2F;screenshot2latex&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;screenshot2latex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rmst&#x2F;screenshot2latex&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;scripts...</a>
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screyeabout 7 years ago
That&#x27;s aweson OP. I can&#x27;t imagine the number of times I&#x27;ve wished for something like this.<p>Coming from a grad student who hates writing equations in latex. I will probably try this out.
_emacsomancer_about 7 years ago
Is there any chance of a Linux client?
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shafyyabout 7 years ago
I was looking for an API that provides math OCR. Great, going to integrate it into our app soon :-) Let me know if you want to add us to your &quot;trusted by&quot; section.
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andreareinaabout 7 years ago
Impressive. Any particular reason that you&#x27;re using<p><pre><code> \left\{ \begin{array} ... \end{array} \right </code></pre> instead of<p><pre><code> \begin{cases} ... \end{cases} ?</code></pre>
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ameliusabout 7 years ago
Mathematicians use operator overloading all the time. It would be nice to have a tool that explains to me what an equation actually means in a given context.
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dcchambersabout 7 years ago
This is insanely impressive. Great work. Wish tools like this existed when I was still in school...almost makes me want to go back and do some more math :)
dfanabout 7 years ago
I tried this on some of my (fairly neat) handwritten physics notes and it was mostly pretty impressive. Failures: a lot of lowercase deltas became 8s and it had no idea what to make of hbar (converting it to n, pi, k, or most often refusing to convert the equation entirely). A fair number of little typos, but you&#x27;d want to check all its work anyway.
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ivirshupabout 7 years ago
Looks like it could be really useful. Have you considered not requiring billing info to try the API?
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laretluvalabout 7 years ago
The Newton quip is a missed opportunity to make a reference to Diamond, his favorite dog who burned up all his papers...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diamond_(dog)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diamond_(dog)</a>
multicolorabout 7 years ago
This is gold, great job. The one clear bug that I&#x27;ve noticed thus far is that it seems to correctly identify \hat{} but not finish it correctly when it also has an index, so that: \hat { y _ { i } } erroneously becomes: \hat { y } _ { i }
brightheroabout 7 years ago
This changes everything concerning my university life for me. I always was on the verge of doing everything digitally, but it was always cumbersome to type out (La)Tex by hand and convert handwritten notes to digital versions.<p>Thank you so much!
conmarapabout 7 years ago
This is something I would have definitely used if I were still a student, although I&#x27;m not a fan of it being a Chrome extension. I&#x27;m still curious enough to test it out.
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thearn4about 7 years ago
Very cool! I had this exact idea of a service a few years back, but was one of those things I never found the time or motivation to actually do. The results seem very nice.
vinni2about 7 years ago
This is great! it is very useful for writing papers. I tried it with some of my equations! It actually improved it by adding more approrpiate braces than I had.
sarenraeabout 7 years ago
The example on the front page thinks the nu is a v. Still cool, though.
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jesuslopabout 7 years ago
Gr8! Would love a way to apply this to PDF and web eqns in Windows.
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zhamisenabout 7 years ago
Cool! Any plans to port to Windows and Linux also?
carpe171about 7 years ago
Just tried it out and it worked great. Nice work!
donparkabout 7 years ago
Add code generator to complete the product. ;-p
amrrsabout 7 years ago
I&#x27;m sorry if it&#x27;s off the topic. The testimonials really cracked me up. “ If I had known about Mathpix earlier, perhaps I would have had enough time to work out the Grand Unified Theory. ” - Albert Einstein
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myf01dabout 7 years ago
This looks neat. Also, the Testimonials section made me laugh. Well done sir.
cup-of-teaabout 7 years ago
So I guess I can expect to see more low quality mathematical typesetting. The technology is great, but I don&#x27;t see how it will help with high quality typesetting.<p>I can type an equation into LaTeX more quickly that I can photograph it and then go in and manually correct all the spacing issues. And there are spacing issues. The examples PDF has things that just look horrible. No small spacing or negative spacing to space out things like matrices and integrals etc. If I&#x27;m going to manually tweak it anyway I might as well do it manually from the start. Typing it up is something that gets quicker with practice like everything else.<p>But what I can actually see happening is people not tweaking the output manually. Either train yourself to use TeX properly, or let someone do it for you.
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