PaperTools VS LaTeX-OCR

I've had similar struggles in the past. My solution at the time was a bib file quasi-managed by hand using JabRef. I would also periodically do some automatic updating using a script I wrote[0]. The script uses the NASA Astrophysics Data System to look for updates to papers (they cross-match arXiv preprints with the eventual publications) and updates the bibtex accordingly. It mostly worked, but there were some bugs (the last 10% takes 90% of the time).

I've since resorted to more hand-checking of references when I'm publishing a paper. Rreference management is tedious, but I've found that it is overall is a minor fraction of the time spent working on a paper. So it doesn't seem worth spending too much effort automating.

[0] https://github.com/privong/PaperTools/blob/main/bib_update.p...

I didn't know that such tools exists (completly new to LaTex). Thanks to your suggestion I looked for an open source althernative (to avoid anoyances of freemium) and I found pix2tex That works really like a charm.

I have recently discovered a few very helpful github packages which help me make notes while listening to lectures. These would be 1. pix2tex (allows you to scan an equation and convert it to latex) 2. pix2text (allows you to scan an equation with words in it and converts it to latex and text) 3. Tesseract (not really a physics related package, but it does allow me to copy notes from transcripts easily) 4. Mathpix an app that performs all the above mentioned operations better than the packages above, but one which ain't free.

This is also a great aid to learing LaTex. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make an OCR system that generates the appropriate LaTex from an picture of an equation?

Turns out the answer is yes:

https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR

LaTeX-OCR