Some TeX Developments

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Finding symbols

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Usually, finding a symbol in (La)TeX means reading through Scott Pakin’s Comprehensive Symbol List. However, that can be hard if all you know is what the symbol looks like. A while ago, there was a suggestion to create some kind of system to find symbols from a drawing. Daniel Kirsch has now taken this on and created Detexify. Initial impressions are very good: the idea is great and is clearly something to keep an eye on. The system relies on being trained: hopefully, a few people taking an interest will build up a good set of training data quickly.

Written by Joseph Wright

June 29th, 2009 at 2:56 pm

Posted in LaTeX

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7 Responses to 'Finding symbols'

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  1. fwiw, i drew a random symbol in detexify and it came up with several good choices. it seems it’s already well trained, presumably on the existing fonts? dunno. anyway, it was pretty nifty; i invited him to write an article for tugboat.

    karl

    30 Jun 09 at 2:21 pm

  2. Great, a TUGBoat article would be nice. As you say, it already seems pretty good (I’ve been doing a little training to help out).

    Joseph Wright

    30 Jun 09 at 3:01 pm

  3. this is great – i’ve just spent ~1 hour doing some training. although it would be great if you could go thru the list more systematically, eg. \hat{a}, \hat{b}, …, \acute{a}, …

    tom

    1 Jul 09 at 1:10 pm

  4. [...] ein schönes neues Tool weist Joseph Wright hin: Daniel Kirsch hat eine interaktive Webanwendung geschrieben, mit der man [...]

    Eitan M. Gurari, Bing, Typographie-FAQ, Korrekturzeichen, Carbon Emacs und AUCTeX, Aquamacs, Kile 2.1 beta, TeXMaker 1.9.2, LyX 1.6.3, Donald E. Knuth, Chaosradio Express, UK TeX FAQ v3.19, LaTeX3, TUG 2009, TeX Live 2009, biblatex, KOMA-Script, deutsche

    5 Jul 09 at 12:25 pm

  5. Hi,

    the tool is great .. Nevertheless, the link should be http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html (current link to http://detexify.kirelabs.org/en/classify is broken).

    Regards

    Henning

    Henning

    11 Jul 09 at 10:13 pm

  6. The Detexify page has in the meanwhile been moved to http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

    Juergen Fenn

    12 Jul 09 at 6:18 am

  7. Henning, Juergen,

    Yes, I’d seen that. The link is correct in my later post: http://www.texdev.net/2009/07/11/detexify-2/.

    Joseph

    Joseph Wright

    12 Jul 09 at 8:35 am

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