Math2Tex

AI

ocr for math notation

SHOW HN2025

79points
16comments
#898of 3,837 in 2025
Top 24%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

1 positive, 7 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 3 critical, out of 11 comments about the project. Thread score -0.16.

Performance: 0 for, 2 againstIdea: 1 for, 0 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Welcomed as a useful tool for the LaTeX community

    From 1 comment
    • This is great! The LaTeX community will grow much more thanks to user friendly tools.
      lorenzohess on HN

Objections

  • Sign-in is required, which some users won't do

    From 2 comments
    • I won't log in to a site i don't know or trust
      raphar on HN
    • Is it possible to ad a whiteboard to draw simple formulas? It requires a Google account. Is it possible to show a precalculated result for the examples? (I like the examples! But…
      gus_massa on HN
  • Failed to convert a photo of Chinese handwritten physics notes

    From 1 comment
    • I uploaded a picture of handwritten note. Why doesn't it return latex code? Below is the output(source code part) of your website: 二. 毕萨伐尔定律: B=∫dB = ∫(μ₀I dl × eᵣ)/(4πr²) 1.…
      jasonni on HN
  • Model and code are closed; commenters want open weights

    From 3 comments
    • I'm always happy to see more innovation in this area. It'd be great if you could make your model, weights, and training corpus public (preferably under a permissive license) on…
      wittjeff on HN
    • I agree that it would be nice if the model was open weights and could run locally. I have digitized almost all of my college handwritten notes, I would love to transcribe them,…
      MayeulC on HN
    • is the source open?
      projectile_ on HN
  • Post text appears LLM-generated

    From 1 comment
    • Any reason for using a transformer architecture? You look at https://olmocr.allenai.org/ which does the best handwritten-to-latex in my opinion also does use VLM. Also maybe xD…
      mostlyk on HN

Requests

  • Open-source the model, weights and training corpus

    From 3 comments
    • I'm always happy to see more innovation in this area. It'd be great if you could make your model, weights, and training corpus public (preferably under a permissive license) on…
      wittjeff on HN
    • I agree that it would be nice if the model was open weights and could run locally. I have digitized almost all of my college handwritten notes, I would love to transcribe them,…
      MayeulC on HN
    • is the source open?
      projectile_ on HN
  • Add a whiteboard for drawing formulas

    From 1 comment
    • Is it possible to ad a whiteboard to draw simple formulas? It requires a Google account. Is it possible to show a precalculated result for the examples? (I like the examples! But…
      gus_massa on HN
  • Show precomputed example outputs without login

    From 2 comments
    • Is it possible to ad a whiteboard to draw simple formulas? It requires a Google account. Is it possible to show a precalculated result for the examples? (I like the examples! But…
      gus_massa on HN
    • I was proposing some samples where the result is calculated by you beforehand, so it's possible to see the result without login in. (Pinky promise that you are not cheating and…
      gus_massa on HN
  • Provide an API

    From 1 comment

Questions

  • Where did the large handwritten math dataset come from?

    From 1 comment
    • Where did you get a large dataset of handwritten maths? I have been looking for such a thing, and I have a lot of my own, but that's just one person's handwriting. I have had a…
      mkl on HN
  • Why use a transformer architecture rather than other VLM approaches?

    From 1 comment
    • Any reason for using a transformer architecture? You look at https://olmocr.allenai.org/ which does the best handwritten-to-latex in my opinion also does use VLM. Also maybe xD…
      mostlyk on HN
  • Will benchmarks be run against Mathpix and other tools?

    From 1 comment
    • I'm always happy to see more innovation in this area. It'd be great if you could make your model, weights, and training corpus public (preferably under a permissive license) on…
      wittjeff on HN

Alternatives named

  • Mathpix (paid)

    From 1 comment
    • Thank you! The other popular tools I'm aware of in this space is MathPix [1] (paid) and Latex-OCR [2] (oss) [1] https://mathpix.com/image-to-latex [2]…
      krackers on HN
  • LaTeX-OCR (open source)

    From 1 comment
    • Thank you! The other popular tools I'm aware of in this space is MathPix [1] (paid) and Latex-OCR [2] (oss) [1] https://mathpix.com/image-to-latex [2]…
      krackers on HN
  • inftyeditor and ffes

    From 1 comment
    • There were already a couple of tools in this space for folks to contrast/compare: inftyeditor: https://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html ffes:…
      WillAdams on HN
  • Detexify

    From 1 comment
    • detexify (https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html) also does drawn character identification and is a webpage.
      DroneBetter on HN
  • Qwen2.5-VL via Ollama

    From 1 comment
    • Where did you get a large dataset of handwritten maths? I have been looking for such a thing, and I have a lot of my own, but that's just one person's handwriting. I have had a…
      mkl on HN
  • olmOCR

    From 1 comment
    • Any reason for using a transformer architecture? You look at https://olmocr.allenai.org/ which does the best handwritten-to-latex in my opinion also does use VLM. Also maybe xD…
      mostlyk on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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