Convert an image of an equation to LaTeX
Paste a screenshot or a photo of one formula. A math-OCR model (Pix2Text MFR 1.5) runs on your own computer and hands back LaTeX you can edit, with a live preview beside it. The picture never leaves the tab.
- One formula per picture
- Nothing uploaded, no account
- 114 MB model, downloaded once
Recognise a formula
Ctrl + V
paste a screenshot of one formula
or drop a PNG / JPG / WebP here, or click to choose one
The typeset formula shows up here.
— waiting for a picture
No screenshot handy? Try one of these
The typeset samples are ours (pdfLaTeX). Whiteboard photo: Luc Comeau-Montasse, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped.
Read in this tab
From screenshot to your document
- Grab one formula. Windows: Win+Shift+S. Mac: Shift+Cmd+Ctrl+4 copies a box straight to the clipboard. Then press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V) on this page. A phone photo works too — box the formula after it loads.
- Check it against the picture. The preview is typeset from the LaTeX box, so any mistake is visible. Fix a symbol in the box and the preview redraws as you type.
- Paste it where it goes. Overleaf and Obsidian: copy $$…$$ or the equation environment. Word (Microsoft 365): press Alt+=, choose LaTeX in the Equation tab, paste, then Convert. Google Docs and Pages: download the SVG or PNG.
What it gets right, and what it doesn't
We ran the same model files this page downloads on our own test pictures. Exact means every symbol matched once spacing is ignored.
| Picture | Exact | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Typeset formulas: fractions, roots, sums, integrals, matrices, an 18:1 single line | 7 of 7 | Includes a blurred, rotated, noisy 'phone photo' copy and a 162-token product of three matrices. |
| The same formulas shrunk to 29 px tall, enlarged 2×, or white-on-black | 30 of 30 | Dark-mode screenshots work as they are; no need to invert colours. |
| Marker on a classroom whiteboard (9 equations cropped from one photo) | 8 of 9 | The miss: a 7 with a crossbar was read as ≠ in 2x+7=14. |
| Chalk on a worn blackboard, French cursive (7 equations) | 0 of 7 | Two came out one or two characters off; cursive ln, crossed x and faint chalk were read as other letters. Messy handwriting needs correcting. |
| A blank page, a landscape photo | no output | Reported as 'No formula found' instead of inventing symbols. |
Speed on an Apple M2 Max: 0.2–1.2 s per formula with WebGPU, 1.9–12 s on the CPU (single-threaded WebAssembly). Time grows with formula length, so a long derivation is quicker in pieces.
Questions
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. The page downloads the model files (114 MB) from our CDN once, stores them in your browser's cache, and from then on the recognition runs inside this tab on your CPU or GPU. The image is never sent to a server, and after the first load the tool keeps working in the same tab even if the connection drops.
Can it read handwritten formulas?
Neat handwriting, yes; messy handwriting, only partly. On nine equations cropped from a real whiteboard photo it got eight exactly right. On seven equations in cursive chalk from a worn blackboard it got none exactly right, although two were off by only one or two characters. Write clearly, crop tightly, and check the preview.
How are matrices, cases and multi-line equations written?
Matrices come out as pmatrix / bmatrix / vmatrix, depending on the brackets in the picture. A single-line equation is written plainly, without an aligned wrapper; two or more aligned lines keep \begin{aligned} with & at the relation sign. The model reads one expression, so a long derivation spread over many lines is more reliable when you box two or three lines at a time.
Why is a symbol wrong, and how do I fix it?
The model sees the picture squashed to 384×384 pixels, so tiny subscripts, primes and look-alikes (1 and l, 0 and O, x and ×) are where errors happen. Edit the LaTeX box: the preview redraws as you type. If the confidence shows below 90%, compare symbol by symbol. A tighter crop or a sharper screenshot usually fixes it.
Can it read a whole page with several formulas?
No. This is a single-formula recogniser: give it a page and it returns nothing useful. Load the page and drag a box around one formula at a time; each result stays in the list under the examples until you close the tab. For text around the formulas use our image-to-text tool; for tables, image-to-table.
How does this compare with Mathpix?
Mathpix Snip's free plan covers 10 images a month (checked 25 Sep 2026) and sends each image to its servers; in return it also reads whole pages and PDFs. This page has no monthly limit and keeps the image on your device, but reads one formula at a time with an open model. For clean screenshots from PDFs and slides, that is usually all you need.
How do I get the result into Word, Google Docs or Markdown?
Word for Microsoft 365: press Alt+= to insert an equation, switch the Equation tab to LaTeX, paste, and choose Convert → Professional. Markdown, Jupyter, Obsidian, Notion: copy $$…$$. LaTeX documents and Overleaf: copy the equation environment. Google Docs, Pages and slides: download the SVG (sharp at any size) or the PNG.
Which model is it, and why is it free?
Pix2Text MFR 1.5 by breezedeus, MIT licence: a DeiT image encoder plus a small TrOCR-style decoder, about 114 MB in fp32. It runs through ONNX Runtime Web, on WebGPU when the browser has it and on WebAssembly otherwise. Running on your machine costs us only the one-time download, so there is nothing to meter. The author's own hosted service runs a paid Pro model that isn't published, so expect it to do better on hard handwriting than this page.