
Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX - ohblahitsme
http://webdemo.myscript.com/#/demo/equation
======
haldean
Detexify is another one that's been around for many years (at least 5 at this
point) and has saved me hours:
[http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)

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haberman
On a somewhat related note, does anyone have any particularly nice ways of
writing math-related notes?

Part of me wants to just hand-write them and then maybe scan them, but that's
not searchable/indexable, and doesn't lend itself well to version control.

Writing in TeX or LaTeX would make them searchable/indexable, but this seems a
little heavyweight for just notes (like answers to exercises). I don't use
TeX/LaTeX that often, so I feel like I'd be spending half of my mental energy
figuring out how to format things, figuring out how to invoke the tools, what
packages to install, etc.

Are there any nice solutions out there for this sort of thing?

~~~
ygra
Don't kill me, but I actually took notes during math lectures using Word [1].
Since 2007 it has math support which you can either enter from the ribbon with
lots of clicks (not recommended) or by typing something that for the most part
resembles math in TeX, except that you use parentheses instead of curly braces
and there are some smarts built-in that make typing much easier, simply
because you're typing less, e.g. x^2y is equivalent to x^{2y} and a/b is
equivalent to \frac{a}{b}.

Symbols are for the most part the same as in TeX, e.g. \alpha, etc.

The nicest thing of all that for interactive note-taking (at least for me) is
that you see what you're entering. While you're typing you always get to see
how it looks. This avoided (again, for me) many situations where I'd leave
syntax errors in an equation just to get home and not remember where I'd
forgot a closing brace.

The worst thing to enter via the plain-text format are large matrices, though
that's no different from TeX, IMHO. In this case using the GUI facilities to
enter them can actually be faster.

A (preliminary) description of the format they use can be found in Unicode
Technical Note #28 [2], although that's not in all cases still the current
implementation.

Fun thing is, there is even a Math Input Panel in Windows which does pretty
much the same as that web app: Convert hand-written math into MathML. You can
then insert it into various applications (Word works fine, Mathematica too, I
think – I guess anything that can handle Presentation MathML on paste or
drag/drop). [3]

[1] Sample:
[http://hypftier.de/files/uni/04/math/Vorlesungsmitschriften....](http://hypftier.de/files/uni/04/math/Vorlesungsmitschriften.pdf)

[2] [http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/](http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/)

[3] Excuse my horrible writing, but I have no pen on this machine:
[http://hypftier.de/temp/2016-01-13_080128.jpg](http://hypftier.de/temp/2016-01-13_080128.jpg)
– Clicking "Insert" while Word is focused, will then yield this:
[http://hypftier.de/temp/2016-01-13_080219.jpg](http://hypftier.de/temp/2016-01-13_080219.jpg)
(it even used the correct d (\dd) which has a small gap in the front and,
depending on the font, can be upright)

~~~
thanatropism
Again, insert enthusiastic Pandoc evangelism. I write first drafts of
technical reports (for work) in Markdown + LaTeX equations (and you already
know most of it, it seems) and then render to Word; in parallel, I write LaTeX
from classes in the very same way.

Hopefully my research will converge with work duties at some point and I'll be
writing a single alpha source for the very technical stuff.

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fragmer
It works quite well, but I wish there was a way to make small corrections
(e.g. erase parts of my input).

The app keeps mistaking my handwritten "n" for "h", and my "k" for various
obscure things like "|x:", and it's a bit of a pain to make small adjustments
after most of the equation has been written:
[https://i.imgur.com/KneVGIU.png](https://i.imgur.com/KneVGIU.png)

~~~
yodsanklai
it's n * (n + 1) / 2 :)

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mazork
Works like a charm on my Surface Pro 3. Incredibly impressed, One note doesn't
recognize my handwriting well but this is incredible as a math undegrad !

As many have said, an open-source app would be a godsend.

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zfedoran
Awesome! This project reminds me of something I worked on years ago:
[http://goo.gl/GKOxrg](http://goo.gl/GKOxrg)

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llull
Very neat. One problem is immediate: when I handwrite an "x" for maths, it is
as two 'c's touching back-to-back, so as not to confuse with some
multiplication/cross-product symbol; such input proves very confusing to this
code.

~~~
microcolonel
Odd, I've done the same thing now and it has worked flawlessly. Maybe it is
learning from the "Perfect / Poor" votes.

~~~
llull
I just retried, and it does now gets it right for me too. Wow.

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paulus_magnus2
I am building an Android (best with stylus) hand writing app...

Drawings can be viewed / shared via web and are updated real-time (online
whiteboard)

some samples:

[http://write-live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934](http://write-
live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934)

[http://docs.write-
live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=2b...](http://docs.write-
live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=2b81b4b1-af48-4a12-bab6-a7844eac91a5)

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vecter
From what I can tell, it had a hard time distinguishing matrices from vectors.
What I wanted was:

    
    
      [ 1 1 ]
      [ 0 1 ]
    

What I got was

    
    
      [ 11 ]
      [ 01 ]

~~~
unfamiliar
To be fair, most humans would probably have difficulty interpreting that. The
problem with a lot of these tools is that they have no idea of context. A
human reading your matrix will know why you are writing it out, and probably
how it is expected to fit into the larger text, and therefore has a lot of
contextual information prompting them towards interpreting your chicken
scratch as a matrix, not a vector.

I tried to write the equivalent of \widetilde{u} which it interpreted as u^n.
On reflection, what I wrote did look like an n above the u. But if you work in
the same field as me, you would immediately assume it was a widetilde.

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radarsat1
This would be quite a cool problem to attack using RNN. Perhaps using an
attention-following mechanism like the one used for house numbers [1]. It's
fairly well-defined. You would need a ton of example data though.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7755](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7755)

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Myrmornis
Very impressive. It worked very well for me.

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geomark
Pretty handy for someone like me who wastes a lot of time trying to get the
Latex right in my R markdown docs.

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billconan
awesome! how does it work? recurrent neural network?

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terda12
This is actually pretty impressive

Tried it out on a random equation from the Fourier transform wiki page:

[http://imgur.com/Ud9FNoA](http://imgur.com/Ud9FNoA)

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analog31
Nice! I can't wait to try it on my touch screen PC.

~~~
lutusp
Tried it -- it doesn't work on my Linux laptop touch-screen, because hand
gestures count only as mouse moves, not drags. Windows might differ.

Update -- it does work on an Android tablet, where hand gestures do count as
drags. Very nice -- if only my tablet were twice as big so my fingers wouldn't
get in each others' way.

Pretty slick. Now to get it as an open-source app.

~~~
cben
They also have a native Android app:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.visionobje...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.visionobjects.calculator&hl=en)

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andreser-mit
Open source?

~~~
Everlag
Looks like it's closed source with a liberal free plan.

[https://dev.myscript.com/pricing/atk/](https://dev.myscript.com/pricing/atk/)

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fabrigm
Good work! Is the code available?

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kevin_thibedeau
Was Sheldon on the design team?

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sdegutis
LaTeX is super cool for mathematics and academic papers. For my book though I
had to migrate off to InDesign because it was just much easier/quicker to get
it to do what I wanted.

~~~
ferrari8608
I got pretty good with InDesign during high school, where I took Graphic
Communications at our vo-tech. It really is an awesome tool for getting print
ready. We used it in conjunction with an actual printing press.

If I had to do it now I would use LaTeX though. For me, open always trumps
proprietary when available, and because of their proprietary sort of walled
garden nature, Adobe is not a company I would like to support.

~~~
sdegutis
Open source is cool and all. But I'm not exaggerating when I say that doing
the same thing in LaTeX would take years longer than doing it in InDesign,
assuming the output of both is close enough to what I'm trying to achieve. So
those years count toward something for me.

