I need an open OCR library which is able to scan complex printed math formulas (for example some formulas which were generated via LaTeX). I want to get some LaTeX-like output (or just some AST-like data).
Is there something like this already? Or are current OCR technics just able to parse line-oriented text?
(Note that I also posted this question on Metaoptimize because some people there might have additional knowledge.)
Considering that current technologies read one symbol at a time (see http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html), I doubt there is an OCR for full mathematical equations.
Infty works fairly well. My former company integrated it into an application that reads equations out loud for blind people and is getting good feedback from users.
According to the answers on Metaoptimize and the discussion on the Tesseract mailinglist, there doesn't seem to be an open/free solution yet which can do that.
The only solution which seems to be able to do it (but I cannot verify as it is Windows-only and non-free) is, like a few other people have mentioned, the InftyProject.
You know, there's an application in Win7 just for that: Math Input Panel. It even handles handwritten input (it's actually made for this). Give it a shot if you have Win7, it's free!