Image2LaTeX

Snip is an amazing app built by Mathpix to help you extract LaTeX (also text) from documents. It gives you the first 50 snips for free every single month. With the help of MathpixOCR and this supplementary app, you can now make up to 1000 OCR requests per month for free.

Image2LaTeX is a personal side project that keeps only core functions of the Snip such as convert images to certain LaTeX equation formats and OCR. For other advanced functions and unlimited snips, subscribe to the Snip for $4.99 per month.

Features

See the features section on MathpixOCR website.

Requirements

Your API keys in your MathpixOCR dashboard (different from the Mathpix account used in the Snip app)
JDK 11 or higher version (OpenJDK is highly recommended) if you plan to use Image2LaTeX-x.x.x.jar

Prerequisites for using this app

Create a config file with the following lines:

APP_ID=YOUR_APP_ID
APP_KEY=YOUR_APP_KEY

Replace YOUR_APP_ID and YOUR_APP_KEY with your API keys.

Put the config file in the same directory location as the executable app. For example, if you are using native build version Image2LaTeX-x.x.x-OS.zip, place it to extracted location Image2LaTeX-OS/bin/ .

Otherwise, this app will create a template config in the aforementioned location at the first launch. Replace your credentials before the first request is submitted.

Do not share your config file with others. This app will also not send your API keys to others except for MathpixOCR API server (see OCRRequest.java to learn how your API keys are used).

Usage

If you downloaded Image2LaTeX-x.x.x-OS.zip, run this app with double-clicking the executable Image2LaTeX (or Image2LaTeX.bat on Windows) at Image2LaTeX-OS/bin/ or with:

./Image2LaTeX

If you downloaded Image2LaTeX-x.x.x.jar and with a JAR launcher installed, run this app with double-clicking Image2LaTeX-x.x.x.jar or with:

java -jar Image2LaTeX-x.x.x.jar

Use your operating system's default methods (or other tools) to take a screenshot of equations or text (Shift (⇧)-Control (⌃)-Command (⌘)-4 on macOS by default).

The Image2Latex app will display the image you captured. Click Submit button to make OCR request. See demo section below.

Demo

FQA

No native self-contained executable application or `.exe` provided?

Not yet. But, with the GA release of Java 14 in 2020, jpackage should be available for packaging self-contained JavaFX application. At that time, I will drop the release of .jar and .zip files and no one (except me) needs to install JDK anymore.

Why two types of the application released? Which one I should download?

The Image2LaTeX-x.x.x-OS.zip is built with the Badass Runtime Plugin which has a huge size. You don't need to have JDK 11 installed for running this version.

Considering the people using similar apps, I assumed that a large percentage of users should have JDK installed. Therefore, a smaller size Fat JAR Image2LaTeX-x.x.x.jar has also released. Plus, the way to execute a .bat file on Windows OS is pretty ugly.

Any plans?

Add a preference panel for user settings, e.g. set API keys in the app, not in the config file.
Add system tray icon support for some Linux distributions.
Implement cross-platform global keyboard listener to remove the Submit button.

Issues

Please first refer to the official OCR API Docs about error types if an error dialogue is displayed.

Still have problems 🤔 ?

Welcome to open an issue with the bug or question label, but the time to fix non-vital bugs may not be guaranteed.

Contributions

Contributions are highly welcomed. Suggestions can be made through opening an issue with enhancement label. Pull Requests including bug fixes, new features, code style guidance, etc., will be reviewed as soon as possible.

License

This code is distributed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

yuhulian/img2latex-mathpix