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Photo to LaTeX: from whiteboard to source in under a minute

Snap a photo of your notes or a whiteboard derivation, and Luzbase turns it into editable LaTeX, math included. Here's how it works and how to get the cleanest results.

Luzbase Team

2 min read

A whiteboard photo of the heat equation next to the LaTeX extracted from it, with an Insert button.
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  • Luzbase Team
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2 min

A forty-minute meeting with your supervisor ends with a whiteboard full of equations. You take a photo. Then, two days later, you spend an hour typing it into your thesis, squinting at whether that symbol was a ν or a v .

Photo to LaTeX cuts out the retyping. Upload the photo, check the result, insert it.

How it works

  1. In the editor toolbar, click Extract text from image (OCR).
  1. Drop an image into the dialog, or browse for one. PNG, JPG, WEBP and HEIC all work, so a photo straight off your phone is fine.
  1. Click Extract Text.
  1. Read through the Extracted text, fix anything that came out wrong, and click Insert.

The LaTeX lands at your cursor. Text stays as text, and formulas come out as math, so a photo of

\frac{\partial u}{\partial t} = \alpha \nabla^2 u
the heat equation

becomes

$\frac{\partial u}{\partial t} = \alpha \nabla^2 u$

Where it earns its keep

  • Meeting whiteboards. The obvious one. Capture the derivation while it's still on the board.
  • Paper notebooks. If you think on paper first, you no longer pay a typing tax to get it into the draft.
  • Old printed material. A table of constants from a textbook, or a page of your own pre-LaTeX notes.
  • Lecture notes. Students can photograph the board and have a working draft of the notes the same evening.

Getting cleaner results

The recogniser is good, but a better photo always gives better output. A few habits help:

  • Shoot straight on. Steep angles distort symbols. Stand in front of the board, not beside it.
  • Crop to what you need. One derivation per image beats a whole wall of the whiteboard.
  • Light it evenly. Glare across a whiteboard can erase a minus sign. Turn off the light directly above it if you can.
  • Always proofread the math. Check subscripts, primes and the difference between 1, l and I. It takes seconds in the dialog and saves a confusing compile later.

Plans

Every account includes Photo to LaTeX. The Free plan has 5 captures a month, which covers the occasional whiteboard. Pro raises that to 100, for people who live on paper notes. One capture is one image converted, and the counter resets every month.

Try it

Find the last whiteboard photo on your phone and run it through. Even if you never use Photo to LaTeX for whole pages, saving the time on one ugly integral is worth it.

Start writing free and try your first capture today.

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