What is the status of generating LaTeX from handwriting (i.e., OCR)?

Very impressed by VisualObjects Web Equation

Screenshot _{(of doncherry's clueless scribbling)}:

Screenshot _{(of Aymon's expert scribing)}:

So, I'm just wondering what the best solution for handwriting -> LaTeX is so far, if any.

There is none, and if there’ll ever be one it’s probably years, if not decades off. I know people who are currently working on recognizing just the layout of a document, i.e. recognizing that a paper represents a letter, etc.

That works fairly well, but it’s still research level, and going from recognizing the layout to replicating the layout using LaTeX is a big, non-obvious step. And we’re not even talking about text recognition itself.

Just text recognition (i.e. ignoring any layout issue) works fairly well today but only for plain text, not with any formatting.

That said, there’s JMathNotes which recognizes basic formulas and produces LaTeX output. It’s a nice and quite powerful proof of concept.

But it’s important to realize that even though many of the individual building blocks exist, piecing together a working solution is hard.

The Mathpix app (for iOS only, Android coming soon) actually does this all on your phone via the camera.

Just take pictures, and you can export as Latex, PDF, or you can get an Overleaf link (they have a really nice browser based editor). The iOS link is:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mathpix/id1075870730?ls=1&mt=8

and the main website is just http://mathpix.com/.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Mathpix. I started working on this as a Stanford grad student in applied math, I hated how long it took to digitize my notes / homework sets. Anyway, Mathpix want to take the pain out of Latex for everyone, I hope this helps!