Using Claude 3.5 to convert an image of mathematics to LaTeX

Just capture the image of some mathematics in a Scientific paper and feed the image into Claude 3.5. It produces LaTeX.

[@johnsim3722]

You're going to have some very disappointed views who thought you were talking about a different type of Latex... I never knew LaTeX was an interpreted language for DTP. My first real experience of DTP was on the BBC Master, but it had to use floppy disc to cache pages, and part pages at that. It was a very slow process to scroll and for that unusable in practice. Second experience was on the Acorn Archimedes A440/1. Now we had a fully 32 bit WIMP OS running on a very fast RISC processor, which made it quicker than x86 and 68040 machines of the time, even though it was only running at 8MHz. Even Microsoft didn't have a useable version of Window yet, and it would spend years running in 16-bits on a 32-bit computer. Windows 95 was the introduction by Microsoft to a 32-bit OS, but large parts of it was still 16-bit. Microsoft was nearly a decade behind. On the Archimedes there was a couple of different DTP packages, but the main and best seemed to be Impression, by Computer Concepts. They also had an equation editor package to add on this, Equasor. That equation editor was super easy and intuitive to use, and even when Microsoft eventually created Word and their own equation editor, Impression and Equasor both were far more useable. Big difference I found was that with Impression once you created the document, it never changed. But with word you could move to a different computer, with a different printer attached, and it would change all your layouts. Suddenly page gaps opened up, and your reference to the above diagram changed as it disappeared off to a different page!

[@TJMoir]

It's a text based language that describes equations more or less. In this way you can reduce the size of a document by a huge amount and the layout of the maths is usually much better than say Word. Also Word has a proprietary method of storage and this is open source and runs on any platform nowadays. Used to be Unix.

[@johnsim3722]

@@TJMoir I was aware it was still going, but that was the limit of my knowledge. I never went looking for it. Open Office seems to be the choice for open source and free office packages, and I've installed it for a couple of older friends who need to do the occasional letter or wanted a spreadsheet to keep track of budgets. They didn't need anything too complex and Microsoft Office seemed far too expensive for what they needed. I get annoyed with Microsoft adding and deleting Publisher from their Office package! I use publisher because it's a better DTP than Word, which is more a document processor. With Publisher you can format the layouts of each page much better. When you're doing an instruction manual, that's much better. But also I print labels through Publisher and keeping a layout mixed with images, texts, and mail merged fields (for a serial number - still no proper automatic indexing for this!), you need the control that it has. One thing I'd say is that you always find that other software seems easier to use than the Microsoft version. This got really bad with the introduction of the Ribbon, removing menus that backed the icons it normally had. They made it hard to find how to do what seasoned users could easily do. Made you have to hunt to try and find how to do an equation! Hide the features to add the features. You get the impression that those who are in charge of product development have never used their own products. Have no idea how their products would be used. And therefore, what people need and more importantly, what power users really need. And if you're selling what is a premium product, that should be easy to accommodate. Hence why even given a free choice, I'd probably still recommend to those older friends the open source solutions. Because they're a bit more simple, a bit more obvious on how to use.