

Handwriting to LaTeX maths - yannis
http://webdemo.visionobjects.com/equation.html?locale=default

======
gpakosz
Hi 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

~~~
dwc
> PS: MathML seems to get little attention, why is it so?

MathML is hard to write and harder to read. The only time I pay any attention
to MathML is when sites do not have TeX as an option. Others may feel
differently, but this is my reason.

~~~
gpakosz
I somewhat expected people would use it as an input to other math software

~~~
alexchamberlain
I think enough people are used to using LaTeX that MathML was never going to
catch on, as its too verbose.

------
kamens
This 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)

~~~
profquail
I 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>

EDIT: GitHub sources:

<https://github.com/kirel/detexify>

<https://github.com/kirel/detexify-hs-backend>

~~~
apathy
The 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 :-)

------
rubidium
!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
There is an 'undo' button at the top-left. Though sometimes it didn't register
touches on my iPad.

~~~
rubidium
ah, sure enough. I limit my suggestion to an eraser then.

~~~
MichaelJW
Their Web Shape demo
(<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.

------
ique
This 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.

~~~
jessriedel
> or to just look up a character you don't know the name of.

There's Detexify for that:

detexify.kirelabs.org/

------
johno215
Very 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.

------
sachdevaprash
<http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html> Found this ages back. It suggests
options and not just one result. Works better.

~~~
lignuist
Works only for single symbols, but not for complex formulas.

~~~
chalst
They 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
Seems 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-f...](http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2097/ocr-lib-for-math-
formulas)

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.

------
drucken
Impressive. 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&#...</a>

------
bdg
This 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.

------
ajuc
It just works. I've thought it will sometimes work. And it just works.

Brilliant.

------
jen_h
So. 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
I 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>

~~~
jen_h
There's a package, wasysym, which gives you \permil, but I always just cheated
with \%_o. Doesn't look very pretty, though. :)

------
fdej
It did -\int _{-\infty }^{\infty }\dfrac {\cos \left( \pi t+\beta \right)
^{2}} {e^{t^{2}}}dt=F\left( \beta \right)

I'm impressed.

------
dfan
That'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).

------
lignuist
Awesome! I really hope, someone comes up with a pdf2tex tool, that handles
formulas well.

Edit: is even more fun on a tablet.

~~~
acharekar
+1

This works amazingly well. Brilliant !

------
keithpeter
Just 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
Funny 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.

------
jrockway
I always dreamed of having a tablet that could do this when I was taking math
in college.

Where's the code?

------
arandomJohn
Oh 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>

------
impendia
If 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
They rely on analysing your strokes. So images cannot be used .

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
This would be great, however, with one of those smart pen/pad combos that
digitally transcribe whatever you're writing/drawing on paper.

------
muyuu
Very 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.

------
gjulianm
Great! 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
Indeed, we don't support matrices _yet_ but this is a feature we're currently
adding, no eta though.

------
alexchamberlain
I'd happily pay for an Android note taking app that integrated this.

~~~
backprojection
I'd pay good money for it

------
cottonseed
This 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...

------
toppy
I'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>

------
ylem
This 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?)

------
rafeed
This is fantastic! It's actually more robust than I thought it was going to
be.

------
kmfrk
I just noticed that they even have a free app in the App Store:
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myscript-memo/id446368116>.

------
sbanach
Try this (free) iPad app. Also contains a numerical solver:

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gridpaper/id385633188?mt=8>

------
deisner
I 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
This 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.

------
drewda
See also Enventra, works with Excel, Mathematica, and Maple:
<http://www.enventra.com/>

------
shocks
Fantastic work, very excited by this. A "learning" technique would be cool, if
I could correct things and the system would learn over time.

------
mattbot5000
Was anyone able to get fractional exponents to work? I tried several different
ways of writing it and had no success.

------
pusha
Great work! Everyone else is thinking "this + wolfram alpha" == algebra / math
analysis problem solver for ipad?

------
baltcode
You guys have got to integrate this with teachontablo or something similar.
That would be simply awesome.

------
jonnycowboy
Is this 100% embedded in javascript? Is the code available un-obfuscated
somewhere? thanks!

~~~
mathieuruellan
No. The client requests a server (Jetty). The server uses our SDK with the
Java version.

------
linuxlizard
Amazing. So much fun, so useful. Will be using this in future homework
assignments!

------
rdl
This would have made university so much more fun.

------
sprash
I did not manage to get $\xi$ working.

------
ylem
Very Cool!!!!!

------
mohene1
Superwork! Hugs!

------
lurker14
Related: <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.

