I turned a notebook full of handwritten math into a LaTeX paper — here's how

Here's a scenario I'll bet some of you recognize: you've been working through a problem by hand for weeks. Your notebook is full of half-finished derivations, scribbled integrals, matrices with question marks next to them. And now you need to turn that mess into a proper LaTeX document.

I had exactly this situation last winter. Forty-odd pages of handwritten notes from a research project, and a paper deadline looming. I knew I couldn't retype everything — especially not the equations. There had to be a better way.

The copy-paste treadmill

The first tool I tried was Mathpix Snip. It's well-known in academic circles for a reason: the OCR accuracy on mathematical notation is genuinely impressive. You screenshot a handwritten equation, and you get clean LaTeX back within seconds.

The problem wasn't the accuracy. The problem was the workflow.

Every single equation involved:

1. Take a screenshot or photo
2. Switch to the OCR tool
3. Wait for conversion
4. Copy the LaTeX
5. Switch back to my editor
6. Paste and adjust

For a single equation, that's fine. For forty pages? It's death by a thousand context switches. By day two I was dreading opening my notes.

Finding TeX64

I stumbled across TeX64 while searching for "latex editor mac ocr built in" or something like that. It's a macOS-only LaTeX editor — Apple Silicon and Intel both supported — and the key thing that caught my eye was that OCR is baked directly into the editor itself.

No separate app. No browser tab. No clipboard dance. You drop an image into the editor and the converted LaTeX appears in your document.

That sounded too good to be true, so I downloaded it (free tier, no account needed) and tried it on a page of my worst handwriting.

What it actually looks like

After installing MacTeX (TeX64 needs an existing TeX distribution — it'll tell you if it can't find one), I opened my project and dropped in a photo of my notebook.

A few seconds later, this appeared in my .tex file:

\begin{align}
  \frac{\partial \rho}{\partial t} + \nabla \cdot (\rho \mathbf{u}) &= 0 \\
  \rho \left( \frac{\partial \mathbf{u}}{\partial t} + \mathbf{u} \cdot \nabla \mathbf{u} \right) &= -\nabla p + \mu \nabla^2 \mathbf{u}
\end{align}

My handwritten Navier-Stokes equations, correctly transcribed, sitting right in my document in editable LaTeX. No switching apps. No clipboard. Just there.

I tested it on a few more pages. Printed math from a textbook screenshot? Near-perfect. My cleaner handwriting? Very good. My worst late-night scrawl? Mostly correct, with a few characters that needed manual fixing.

The pattern I noticed: TeX64 is excellent on math notation specifically. The structural stuff — \frac, \int, \sum, matrix brackets — comes through cleanly. Individual symbols occasionally need correction, but the scaffolding is almost always right.

The workflow I landed on

Here's what actually worked for my paper:

For each section of notes:

1. Photograph the page (phone camera, decent lighting)
2. Drop into TeX64 — OCR runs automatically
3. Read through the output, fix any misread symbols
4. Use Axiom (TeX64's AI assistant) to clean up formatting

That last step was something I didn't expect to use much but ended up relying on constantly. Axiom can read your compile logs — and since OCR output often has subtle structural errors (mismatched brackets, missing \end tags), those errors showed up frequently.

Instead of debugging LaTeX by hand, I'd ask Axiom: "What's wrong with this compile?" It would look at the actual log, identify the line, and show me a diff. One click to apply.

Example interaction:

Me: "Why is this not compiling?"
Axiom: "Line 312: \begin{align*} is not closed. Here's the fix:"
[shows diff]
[I click Apply]
Done.

That flow — photograph → OCR → Axiom cleanup → compile — got me through forty pages of notes in about two days instead of the week I'd budgeted for.

SyncTeX made verification fast

One thing that helped enormously with checking my work: SyncTeX is built in. You click anywhere in the PDF and jump to the corresponding source line. Click in the source and jump to the PDF location.

For verifying that a converted equation rendered correctly, this is incredibly useful. Instead of manually scrolling through both windows to find where something is, you click once and you're there.

Honest limits

macOS only. This is a hard stop — TeX64 doesn't run on Windows or Linux.

You still need MacTeX or TeX Live installed. TeX64 is the editor; it needs an external TeX distribution to compile. The setup takes maybe 20 minutes if you haven't done it before (TeX64 will walk you through it if MacTeX is missing).

Handwritten text OCR isn't as strong as math OCR. This tool is clearly optimized for mathematical notation. Regular handwritten prose came through with more errors, so I still typed out my non-equation text.

Free tier has limits. For a paper's worth of OCR, you'll likely bump into the usage cap and want the paid plan. That said, it's worth trying on free to see if the accuracy meets your needs before committing.

The one thing that changed my workflow

Before TeX64, the OCR step and the editing step were two separate places in my brain. I had to context-switch between "get the LaTeX" mode and "write the paper" mode.

Having OCR inside the editor eliminated that. When I'm looking at a page of notes and need to pull an equation into my document, I don't leave the app. I drop the image. It appears. I keep writing.

That's it. That's the whole difference. And for paper-writing momentum, it turned out to matter a lot.

If you're on a Mac and you're facing a stack of handwritten research notes: tex64.com. Worth a try.