[HN Gopher] Detexify: LaTeX Handwriting Symbol Recognition
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Detexify: LaTeX Handwriting Symbol Recognition
Author : susam
Score : 162 points
Date : 2023-11-14 23:56 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (detexify.kirelabs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (detexify.kirelabs.org)
| mvh wrote:
| I use this every week and have been using it for years. Huge fan.
| jstrieb wrote:
| Haven't used this since college, but it was very helpful then!
| blt wrote:
| There's also an android app! It's nice to draw with your finger
| instead of a mouse.
| kaashif wrote:
| I prefer drawing with a pen, then a mouse, and only then my
| finger. When I lift my finger up and put it back down I don't
| know the exact point it'll register as!
|
| Sorry to go all Hacker News on you.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Instead of drawing with a single isolated finger, try writing
| with an invisible pen: pinch your fingers together like you
| are holding a pen (e.g., index, middle, and thumb), lower it
| to the screen until one finger touches, and then draw as if
| you had a pen in your hand.
|
| This lets you use your same muscle memory. No need to guess
| where your finger will register. I prefer this dramatically
| more than drawing with a mouse.
| a-dub wrote:
| that android app has been around for over ten years! close to
| fifteen maybe!
| ashton314 wrote:
| No one in STEM would get their PhD without this tool. It's
| amazing
| kccqzy wrote:
| This is what I consider to be truly useful AI without the
| buzzwords. Doesn't need those buzzwords either.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Can get rid of the AI buzzword as well then. This is machine
| learning.
| SJMG wrote:
| Fun fact: it's written in Haskell
| theanonymousone wrote:
| I remember what a great help it was in writing my LaTeX documents
| back in 2010. Probably the forefather of all these GenAI
| assistants :D
| dayeye2006 wrote:
| I once tried to build a replicate with ML classifier. It was
| quite fun. And to achieve the accuracy of detexify is quite hard
| jsweojtj wrote:
| Related (but not identical), Facebook research just released an
| open source pdf -> markdown reader (that does a good job w/
| equations in latex).
|
| https://facebookresearch.github.io/nougat/
| jsweojtj wrote:
| I've used it to convert 40 page pdfs into text, and it did an
| impressive job.
| pantsforbirds wrote:
| I've had really good results with it so far. I'm using it in
| the Huggingface Transformers library, and it's been great for
| my workflow.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| This is quite nice. The generalization of this to full formulas
| is much more difficult. In most languages, letters are designed
| to be distinct, and in case of confusion, many times a secondary
| pass with a dictionary [1] helps quite a lot.
|
| But mathematics symbols are often quite close, as evidenced by
| this app. There are multiple suggestions for each input, and they
| are often quite close that without larger context it is difficult
| to tell which one the user meant. My handwritten mathematical x,
| greek chi, and the times symbol look very similar. Alpha and
| "proportional to". Etc etc. At minimum, the ai would likely need
| some understanding of the structure of mathematical statements
| and equations to do this better.
|
| [1] Or even a third pass with a grammar checker.
| amai wrote:
| See
|
| https://facebookresearch.github.io/nougat/
|
| and
|
| https://lukas-blecher.github.io/LaTeX-OCR/
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| These are on digital documents, where the characters do look
| different. Handwritten characters look similar. It's a much
| more difficult task.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| There is a desktop app version of this, it rocks:
| https://github.com/zoeyfyi/TeX-Match
| amelius wrote:
| Curious how they trained it.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| A lot of volunteer training data - I contributed a bunch to it
| when it was under development!
| jordigh wrote:
| This is pretty old. It's been around for at least a decade,
| maybe longer. Do you remember when you were working on it?
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I don't remember the exact year, but 2009-2010ish I think.
| Definitely more than a decade ago.
|
| edit: Actually after searching my email, I think I started
| using it in 2007.
| unhammer wrote:
| Maybe https://github.com/kirel/detexify-hs-
| backend/blob/master/src...
|
| on
|
| https://github.com/kirel/detexify-data
| lagrange77 wrote:
| I remember Maple had this 15+ years ago.
| amai wrote:
| See also
|
| https://facebookresearch.github.io/nougat/
|
| and
|
| https://lukas-blecher.github.io/LaTeX-OCR/
| spacebacon wrote:
| Can someone explain the trend of ditching SSL certificates?
| lol768 wrote:
| What trend? It's served over TLS for me.. DV cert from Let's
| Encrypt.
|
| It might try and load a webfont over http:// but any decent
| browser will just refuse to load that sub-resource.
| spacebacon wrote:
| Interesting. Thanks for the heads up.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| This site is served over TLS for me, and I don't see HTTP-only
| sites as a trend, but there are a couple reasons to forego SSL:
|
| 1. Decentralization
|
| 2. Better performance
|
| Opting out of SSL is fine for static sites that don't handle
| any kind of authentication.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| Why is a lack of SSL a form of centralization?
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I'm meant things are less centralized without SSL - I
| worded my other comment wrong, edited now.
| spacebacon wrote:
| Update, some how I commented on the wrong thread.
| itointegral wrote:
| Handy, although gotta say I hate to be that person but GPT 4 is
| light years better than this tool. You can provide it with a
| picture of an equation you'd like to obtain as LaTeX commands and
| it'll do its job. Done it 30+ times so far and it's been 100%
| accurate.
| lanstin wrote:
| LaTeX is one of those domains where GPT4 is amazing. Along with
| eMacs lisp, tho it is better at LaTeX than elisp, where I have
| had it cycle into non-convergent series of errors. Much better
| than it is at actually making sense of the mathematics,
| interestingly.
| xigoi wrote:
| But GPT-4 isn't open-source.
| kweingar wrote:
| Seems like a different use case. This tool is very helpful when
| you know what the symbol looks like but you don't have an
| example sitting in front of you.
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