Draw a math symbol and get the corresponding LaTeX code

Just showed this to a math PhD grad student. Her eyes immediately lit up. She instantly determined that who ever made this, is in fact a genius.

Great idea and great implementation. I have seen so much LaTeX frustration. This will definitely ease a lot of pain.

Great idea. It got my attempts and an integral and delta right off, but I had to try a few times with a lower-case sigma.

edit: It allows you to submit training examples, which is a great idea. Just did two for lower-case sigma.

Missing feature: the ability, after training a symbol, to click a button whose meaning is "Whoops, I didn't mean to do that". (I gave it some training examples for a couple of arrow-type symbols. I forgot to click to switch from one sort of arrow to the other. It now has a left-pointing arrow as a training case for a right-pointing arrow symbol. Or maybe the other way around; I forget which.)

Of course that was an utterly boneheaded mistake. But most people -- even among the likely users of this thing -- are boneheaded occasionally.

(Looking at the source, it seems that un-training would be quite easy; the app is doing nearest-neighbour classification, and what it stores is just all the examples it's been given.)

A brilliant idea! Would love to see a blog post overviewing how it works.

This might be nitpicking but I feel like the "Clear" button is misplaced. There must be another position for it that allows me to quickly reset and start drawing another character. Come to think of it, it would be great if there was a key for it. Click and drag with the mouse, reset with a keystroke. Almost like playing a first person shooter!

This is awesome, and it works. My only quibble is that it doesn't seem to handle accented characters, ie it finds \aa, presumably because that's a single symbol, but it doesn't find \"{a} and it doesn't even seem to show up in the training list.

Suggestion: turn off the ajax that auto-submits as soon as I "lift up" my pencil. Alot of symbols require more than one stroke.

Instead just give me a "done" button.

It would be awesome if this were integrated into a LaTeX editor, so I could (e.g.) click a "draw" button in the toolbar. Then I'd get a little drop-down canvas, and when I get the suggestions back from the server, I could click on the right macro, and it would be automatically inserted into my diagram.

No surface integrals!? (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_theorem, the one with the circle showing integral over the boundary surface, there's a triple version of that too).

Have you guys seen Windows 7's math input thingie? It does the same thing for formulas (as opposed to symbols) and MathML. I was amazed to see this in a default install of a Microsoft OS.

That's one of the most useful tools I've seen in a long time. Especially being a non-native English speaker this is always a pain.

works on firefox, but somehow on safari it didn't detect mouse (trackpad) button up.

Pople who couldn't get somehting to work can click on "Symblos" and train it.

I couldn't get Pi to work (like a little hut).

I would love if you could get it to also interpret equations...

A while back I thought of doing the same thing for Unicode characters... am I a genius too?