PDF to LaTeX converter

Question

I am searching for a free software that converts a PDF in a LaTeX file.

Actually I don't need it to convert the whole PDF, I just need to "extract" the formulas and use them to make my own LaTeX file.

Answer 1

You can use InftyReader:

• free
• generate LaTeX from images of math formulas (source image files must be in TIF, PNG, or GIF formats)
• far from perfect in terms of accuracy, but I'm not aware of better.

Other ideas.

Answer 2

You can use im2markup to convert images of mathematical equations to LaTeX mathematical equations:

• Deng, Yuntian, Anssi Kanervisto, and Alexander M. Rush. "What You Get Is What You See: A Visual Markup Decompiler." arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.04938 (2016). https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04938
• open source: ANN-based, Torch7

Building on recent advances in image caption generation and optical character recognition (OCR), we present a general-purpose, deep learning-based system to decompile an image into presentational markup. While this task is a well-studied problem in OCR, our method takes an inherently different, data-driven approach. Our model does not require any knowledge of the underlying markup language, and is simply trained end-to-end on real-world example data. The model employs a convolutional network for text and layout recognition in tandem with an attention-based neural machine translation system. To train and evaluate the model, we introduce a new dataset of real-world rendered mathematical expressions paired with LaTeX markup, as well as a synthetic dataset of web pages paired with HTML snippets. Experimental results show that the system is surprisingly effective at generating accurate markup for both datasets. While a standard domain-specific LaTeX OCR system achieves around 25% accuracy, our model reproduces the exact rendered image on 75% of examples.