Muboard: Mathematics Chalkboard with LaTeX and Markdown Support | Hacker News Reader

Muboard: Mathematics Chalkboard with LaTeX and Markdown Support

muboard.net

50 pointssusam28 comments

Give me the _reverse_ of this (an actual chalkboard which will turn handwriting into Latex) and you can have all of my money.

Notability (almost) does that, and manages to correctly understand very complicated expression with poor penmanship. It currently doesn't support exporting of actual Latex, just the rendered equation.

Damn, I got really excited and looked it up, only to find out it's iOS/Mac only.

I tried this when it was attached to Myscript Nebo a few years ago and found that it was middling w/ subscripts and superscripts. Maybe the product has improved in the meantime since it's been about three years since I tried to use it.

I’ve tried it on notability and for my use it’s really terrible. Sure it can understand complex expressions but 99% of the time it gets at least one thing wrong. Now that might normally be fine, except there’s no way to fix it because it just takes handwriting and gives you an image.

It’s possible notability actually uses the same API (although it doesn’t seem like it), but the mathpix api is great for this. It gives you back latex in whatever form you want. They have a desktop client but you can get more free requests direct with the API.

It lets me just snip any math and paste into my markdown editor (that renders latex) then I’ll often change one or two broken symbols and I’m off to the races.

100% my experience as well. I would love to have a quick way of having my handwritten equations rendered to latex (possibly with errors) and easily import into a markdown/latex document on my desktop.

What's your workflow to go from handwriting (on iPad?) to mathpix to desktop?

You should check out Mathpix Snip apps. The iPad app lets you write equations that will then show up in the desktop app where you can copy and paste the generated latex.

Disclaimer: I work for Mathpix

I use notability which syncs through iCloud and shows up on my Mac. Sometimes it takes a second to sync but I don’t constantly write in real time and convert to latex so it works.

Sometimes I also copy with notability and paste on my Mac through iCloud clipboard sharing but that feature seems to work about 25-50% of the time.

I use mathpix for textbooks, websites and handwritten math but if I know beforehand I’m going to need it in latex I generally find it easier just to type.

Are you willing to give your money to Microsoft? There's the Math input panel included with Windows, and Onenote has ink-to-math as an integrated feature. Of course to properly use either of them, you need a tablet computer with a digitizer pen.

Can you take that and convert it to LaTeX?

Yes.

I have not tried this. I have tried a similar product from Notability/MyScript Nebo and discovered that I have less-recognizable handwriting than average, I guess.

I just use entr[1] with pandoc -s --katex.

[1] http://eradman.com/entrproject/ A generic watcher.

I'm not sure this contributes anything fresh or simplifying to existing Latex workflows. One could easily get the same thing in VSC or numerous other tools in this recently energetic space.

From understanding this is not supposed to add anything to existing workflows. The idea seems to be that the presenter can "live-code" the mathematical expressions during presentation, much like mathematics is taught at universities.

> From understanding this is not supposed to add anything to existing workflows. The idea seems to be that the presenter can "live-code" the mathematical expressions during presentation, much like mathematics is taught at universities.

This is a workflow, especially during surging interest in remote education + premium notes.

But most of the lecture is going to consist of errors displayed on the 'chalkboard' while you finish typing ('missing superscript').

(Aside: I tried to copy the full error, but it overrides the context menu with some nasty flash-looking thing, why!)

Thank you for clarifying the idea behind this tool. That is indeed the reason why I wrote this tool. I host meetings for an analytic number theory book club[1] where I use this tool to display math snippets (to elaborate a step in the book, to illustrate a theorem with examples, etc.) during our discussions. Additionally, the tool also supports self-rendering boards [2] which is useful to archive the notes taken for our book club meetings as self-rendering HTML files.

[1]: https://antmeet.github.io/boards/

[2]: https://github.com/susam/muboard#distributable-boards

let me recommend LyX to you, which is a graphical frontend to latex that instantly renders.

https://www.lyx.org/

watch here for a demo

https://youtu.be/3GdJUI0-YSo?t=42

Thanks! I am aware of LyX and I did try it earlier. I guess I prefer a non-WYSIWYM approach.

I also wanted to be able to share the board snippets discussed during the meetings in the same format, i.e., a simple HTML that self-renders itself as a board. That helps in both archiving the boards as well as reusing the boards in future meetings, if necessary. This was one of the few reasons why I just decided to write my own tool that suits my needs.

I have explained some of the reasons behind writing this tool here: https://github.com/susam/muboard#why (see section "Why?").

Here are a few examples of what the distributable board files look like: https://antmeet.github.io/boards/ .

sorry! i read too fast and missed the part where you said you were the creator! oh well i'm sure your reasons are good for your use case. personally after discovering lyx i am never going back to latex lol. also kudos on digging into ANT :)

I thought it would have a chalk handwritten font. A chalk handwritten or comic sans font would make me use this.

Doesn't seem very different from https://artofproblemsolving.com/texer which has been around for quite a while.

AOPS texer doesn't recompile "live" on every character input.

The idea is cool, but I'm really missing the point. Isn't this just Markdown + MathJax?

This tool is designed for interactive use (with an audience).

It offers a split-pane view where you can see what you are typing and the displayed version at the same time. That is an improvement for working with an audience.

At first I thought there was no local save. The `,help` docs are quick - use `,save`.

Perhaps someone can propose a substitute, but just saying "it's like a Visual Studio Code extension" does not seem accurate.

I tried it a bit, the ergonomics are not bad. I certainly did not have the experience of the other posters saying that most of the time was spent in some error mode "waiting for the subscript to complete". The ability to define your own "comma macros" would be cool.

An aside: muboard is permissively licensed (MIT).

Thank you for taking a close look at this tool and writing this detailed review. The current collection of comma macros is based on what I frequently need. The ability to define our own "comma macros" sounds very interesting. I will consider it if and when I get time to implement it.

I appreciate the unicode support.

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