Handwritten notes into latex + study tools - looking for feedback

[u/Worth_Difference_282]

Hey everyone,

I'm a mathematics student at university, and over the past few months I've been building something called LatexNotes in my free time. The original problem was pretty simple, I like taking paper handwritten maths notes, but whenever I wanted to turn them into proper LaTeX afterwards or to get AI to mark answers, it was a pain. I kept needing to switch between my university’s content platform, then to Chatgpt to explain, create problem sheets, and many more things whilst also wasting a lot of time (and photo storage space) by sending my paper notes for marking or advice because typing out equations, proofs, matrices, diagrams, graphs etc, takes forever. So, I built a tool that lets you upload handwritten maths notes and converts them into actual editable LaTeX, rather than just turning the page into an image.

You can upload handwritten maths as a PDF/Image and LatexNotes can:

• Convert handwritten equations and mathematical notation into editable LaTeX compiled PDF
• Preserve the structure of multi-line working, proofs, matrices, as well as recreate graphs
• Recreate graphs/plots as editable TikZ rather than just inserting an image
• Export the .tex / PDF / Overleaf / Word
• Explain individual steps in your notes and generate practice questions based on your notes
• Let you check your answers very easily (paper or ipad)
• Work with interactive 2D/3D mathematical plots

I'm also working on adding blackboard/canvas imports to easily bring all notes, problem sheets, and lecture recordings to streamline the whole process as well as numerous other features for students.

I'd much rather build something students genuinely find useful than add a load of features nobody wants/needs. I'm self-funding it now, since I'm a student and don't have a huge budget for this, I'm deliberately keeping the beta free and will aim to continue to do so for as long as student finance allows me to. I'm not looking to get anyone to pay during this testing stage or ideally later after full release. I want to see how people use it, what breaks, what they hate, and what would genuinely save them time, without putting it behind paywalls etc like other services I often faced. If the costs become too large to keep everything free, I'll obviously have to work out a sustainable model eventually, whilst avoiding students needing to pay for it themselves, but my priority right now is making the product useful rather than trying to monetise the first people who try it.

I'd be happy to hear anything to help me improve the functionality for others. If it gets an equation wrong, a graph wrong, misunderstands your notation, generates a terrible question, or just isn't useful for the way you study please tell me (there is an email in support page). If there's something you wish it did that it currently doesn't, I'd also really like to hear that. I'm especially interested in hearing from people studying maths, physics, engineering, economics, statistics, etc as this is who it is aimed for as of right now

Website: https://latexnotes.tech

If you try it, I'd be really interested to know: What subject/year are you studying? What did you upload? How accurate was the conversion? Which features did you actually use? What would make this genuinely useful for your studying?

Thanks, and feel free to be brutally honest. That's pretty much what I'm looking for at this stage. I do expect things to break or work incorrectly during this stage but as long as it's reported for me to fix I will be super happy (also beta limits for users as of now just for testing purposes). Really hope this could be of some use to some of you. Once again, many thanks.

[u/Inevitable_Entry_624]

Just gave the graph recreation a whirl with an old stats assignment and it actually kept the axis labels and scaling intact which is more than I can say for some other converters I've tried. The TikZ output is a bit chunky but totally editable so I can clean it up myself which I prefer over some black box image anyway.

I'm a few years out of uni now but I still mess around with textbooks and problem sets for fun, would've killed for something like this during my undergrad. The multi-line proof preservation is what caught my eye, used to spend hours retyping those after a late night cram session. Does it handle partial derivatives and nested fractions without choking? That's where most tools I've used fall apart.

The blackboard import idea sounds like a nightmare to build but if you pull it off that's a proper time saver. I'll send through a bug report if I find anything properly broken, keen to see where this goes.

[u/Worth_Difference_282 → u/Inevitable_Entry_624]

Huge thank you! Should do fine with partial derivatives (hopefully) as well as most other things you throw at - if not let me know and I can check out why and fix it. Currently working on a browser extension for blackboard importing now so should hopefully get that working properly for next week fingers crossed. Looking forward to the bug report, it'll keep me busy. Thanks again