[HN Gopher] Mathpix: Convert Images and PDFs to LaTeX
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Mathpix: Convert Images and PDFs to LaTeX
Author : amai
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-05-25 20:48 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mathpix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathpix.com)
| [deleted]
| tikej wrote:
| Mathpix is a great product that perfectly fills its niche and I'm
| very happy it exists.
|
| I wish some open source alternative existed. Even much less
| accurate would be quite useful. I know latexify but it does only
| single symbols.
|
| Maybe it will be implemented as an extra language in tesseract
| someday.
| anewhnaccount2 wrote:
| This is an open source alternative that works quite well
| https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR
| tikej wrote:
| Wow, thanks! I had no idea it existed. I've searched for
| something like it not that long ago.
| necovek wrote:
| I think their testimonials are all made up!
|
| (I still had a good laugh, kudos!)
| jesuslop wrote:
| A real one here, the tech is beyond expectations, the decoding
| of equations is super, even of scanned sources. It only faults
| at complex environments such as matrices or diagrams
| (interpreted as cloud-URL to bitmap). It also OCRs surrounding
| text. Couples nice with Typora Mathjax for an integrated
| wysiwyg-markdown+latex experience.
| waynecochran wrote:
| I think they left out the testimonies by Genghis Khan and Adolf
| Hitler ... something to the effect of how they could have
| conquered the Holy Roman Empire and the remaining part of
| Europe if they had this software. I guess they understandably
| didn't want to be tied to those characters.
| k2enemy wrote:
| Kind of unfortunate that a few of the demo pictures have a
| binomial coefficient and the resulting latex code uses a
| long/complicated array to express it rather than \binom. I'm not
| sure I'd want to use this for anything I'll want to edit by hand
| in the future.
| cinntaile wrote:
| When you use this it's usually because you don't want to
| handcraft the latex to recreate an equation from another
| source. It's unfortunate that it doesn't create the most
| plausible form, because it would help when you want to edit the
| equation but it's definitely not a dealbreaker.
| sharikous wrote:
| I am very satisfied by their service, for an avid scientific
| reader it is invaluable. Not only the output is good (it's mostly
| right, only slightly more verbose than necessary, for example a^2
| will be returned as a^{2}), but also the UX is excellent.
|
| The only perk is that they significantly downsized their free
| tier some time ago.
|
| I think there are some papers with open source deep learning
| models for this task but I never got to try one of them,
| unfortunately.
| tmabraham wrote:
| Mathpix is great, but they have become much more restrictive.
|
| I had an old version of this software which I think allowed for
| unlimited snips but now I am limited to 100 for the free version.
| Plus this is also a closed-source proprietary product. I will
| look into the open-source alternative linked in this thread.
| CJefferson wrote:
| I tried this out on a paper I like to read, but which only exists
| as a scan: http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/nauty/pgi.pdf
|
| Mathpix did better than I expected, but still no-where near well
| enough for me to give the results to anyone without some fairly
| significant editing. It would certainly speed up creating a latex
| copy of the paper, but for example whenever something has a
| subscript and superscript, the superscript seems to be ignored.
| jesuslop wrote:
| yep, same hapened. You have to extract the pages of interest
| before submitting, they have no page UI.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Sorry, I changed by comment when I independantly discovered I
| had to extract individual pages :)
| NmAmDa wrote:
| I used to use them two years ago when they offered 200 snip for
| educational accounts. I then subscribed for personal plan for 5$
| when I was writing my MS thesis. It was useful and make me write
| quicker ( Still needed manual edits for most of the time). I then
| cancel my subscription when they put a limit on personal paid
| plan. Then they raised the prices of the (now limited) plan two
| times in the last couple of months. They also moved the free plan
| to be more of a demo. starting this month this ia their plans
|
| Free Subscriptions: 10 Snips / month 20 PDF pages / month
|
| Educational Subscriptions: 20 Snips / month 50 PDF pages / month
|
| Pro Subscription: 5,000 Snips 1,000 PDF pages per month $7.99 /
| month and $69.99 / year
|
| I hope to see more competition in this field.
| necovek wrote:
| FWIW, pricing information was almost impossible to find on a
| phone: you had to scroll all the way down on the particular
| service page (eg. https://mathpix.com/ocr), so much so that I've
| missed it originally.
|
| There are no links whatsoever to the pricing, so only going back
| and forcing myself to scroll through the entire page, did I
| manage to find it.
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(page generated 2022-05-28 23:01 UTC)