Re:The future of education is plain text
by ferdterguson on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @01:02AM
(#14550748)
Not sure if you are aware of detexify [0], but it recognizes my trackpad-scratch quite well. The backend and all of the training data are open source, so you could indeed implement this yourself if you wanted.
I'd buy mobile app any LaTeX OCR software.
Yes, detexify is amazing! That's probablly how I got the idea in the first place... "Imagine if detexify would automatically read all of my math writing, not symbol by symbol what I draw with mouse."
But the point is, mathematics written as a plaintext document needs an interpreter, unless you have been writing papers with math notation for some years. But it is still far more cumbersome (and looks ugly) than writing formulas by hand. And that's not exactly plaintext learning material anymore, then, even though the sources are text files (unlike Word documents).
My ideal workflow (the one I dream about) would be a document camera -like setup that parses math I write on a paper (or a blackboard) into LaTeX (or MathML) style format and ~immediately renders it as beautiful document (with MathJax or similar tool). Like Overleaf, but without typing. (And of course then I could open the source file in text editor to make edits.)