Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX • Hacker News Board

Re: Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX

#41

Post by thanatropism » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

haberman wrote: post #17

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…

I handwrite them then type them.

Use Pandoc; it basically abstracts all of the pain of LaTeX and allows you to write Markdown with equations. Writing macros is also useful to save typing cramps and clarify meaning -- a typical example is

    \newcommand{\implies}{\Rightarrow}

Re: Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX

#42

Post by thanatropism » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 1:00 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #25

haberman wrote: post #17

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…

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.…

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.

Re: Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX

#43

Post by radarsat1 » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

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

Re: Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX

#44

Post by terda12 » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

This is actually pretty impressive

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

http://imgur.com/Ud9FNoA

Re: Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX

#45

Post by sdegutis » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

ferrari8608 wrote: post #16

sdegutis wrote: post #6

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.

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…

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.

Re: Convert hand drawn equations to LaTeX

#46

Post by cben » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 10:38 PM UTC

grayclhn wrote: post #27

haberman wrote: post #17

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…

Pandoc if you like markdown -- it allows LaTeX math and equations. Emacs org mode if you like emacs and not markdown. Lately I've just found it easiest to use a text editor that has good keyboard support for entering unicode and just type everything in plain text. Vim's digraphs or Emacs's TeX input method are what I have in mind. It works fine for most personal notes (with a few unevaluated LaTeX macros on occasion)…

Yep. For notes there is little justification for the full complexity of LaTeX, the most one needs is islands of LaTeX math. And you don't even need TeX installed — html with mathjax/katex is more flexible most of the time (but Pandoc will easily convert to latex/beamer when you need them).

I'm cataloguing math support in markdown tools at https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown (help welcome). If you don't know where to start, the first to check out are probably StackEdit, Atom + https://discuss.atom.io/t/using-atom-for-academic-writing/19....

I have a theory that a single pane styled in-place is nicer for quick writing than 2 source+preview pane. Typora, Texts.io, and my own https://mathdown.net do that.

If you do want full latex, try Overleaf.com, which has "rich text" mode where many constructs (sections, lists, math) are styled in-place (you could even hide the PDF pane).