6 ms·

Heh, I read the title and thought this was going to be about someone porting legacy publications into Latex code. Anything from Newton's gravity to Marie Curie

Heh, I read the title and thought this was going to be about someone porting legacy publications into Latex code. Anything from Newton's gravity to Marie Curie radium. Which would be nice - some seminal publications from not all that long ago are only available as terrible quality scans.

eigenblake 4d ago
This is an excellent idea. I was curious about using DeepSeek OCR for exactly this purpose. But a tricky question is if we could do some sort of looping or something "energy based" and use classical search to find optimal parameters (LaTeX settings) to minimize the error (pixel difference). Me knowing I would get obsessed with the second half is what's keeping me from the first half. Maybe a vision JEPA would be good. If I had API credits to burn, I'd copy paste our two comments and see how far Fable gets.
wenc 4d ago
I just asked GPT6-Astra to transcribe a page from Newton's Principia to LaTeX. It did an amazing job outputing a XeLaTeX doc with a mixture of text and TikZ. Looks really good.
- aix1 4d ago
  Did you do a pixel diff against the original? The output could look plausible at a glance but contain hard-to-spot errors or inaccuracies.
  - userbinator 4d ago
    Unchecked OCR can lead to amusing results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18374359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18374359
- loloquwowndueo 3d ago
  Nice! Where is it? Thanks for sharing. (Also hopefully not in GitHub , it’s always down)
  - wenc 3d ago
    Orig image (2nd page): https://lib.utah.edu/collections/rarebooks/database/science/principia.php https://lib.utah.edu/collections/rarebooks/database/science/... XeLaTeX: https://nullpaste.org/mcKAFOqJmbZv https://nullpaste.org/mcKAFOqJmbZv PDF output: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rfaio8a6pgem98fy8cxzb/principia-page-283.pdf?rlkey=zqtuus0yyrbn2e168qg1jijvt&st=r753lqhp&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rfaio8a6pgem98fy8cxzb/princip...

eigenblake 4d ago

This is an excellent idea. I was curious about using DeepSeek OCR for exactly this purpose. But a tricky question is if we could do some sort of looping or something "energy based" and use classical search to find optimal parameters (LaTeX settings) to minimize the error (pixel difference). Me knowing I would get obsessed with the second half is what's keeping me from the first half. Maybe a vision JEPA would be good. If I had API credits to burn, I'd copy paste our two comments and see how far Fable gets.

wenc 4d ago

I just asked GPT6-Astra to transcribe a page from Newton's Principia to LaTeX. It did an amazing job outputing a XeLaTeX doc with a mixture of text and TikZ. Looks really good.

aix1 4d ago
Did you do a pixel diff against the original? The output could look plausible at a glance but contain hard-to-spot errors or inaccuracies.
- userbinator 4d ago
  Unchecked OCR can lead to amusing results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18374359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18374359
loloquwowndueo 3d ago
Nice! Where is it? Thanks for sharing. (Also hopefully not in GitHub , it’s always down)
- wenc 3d ago
  Orig image (2nd page): https://lib.utah.edu/collections/rarebooks/database/science/principia.php https://lib.utah.edu/collections/rarebooks/database/science/... XeLaTeX: https://nullpaste.org/mcKAFOqJmbZv https://nullpaste.org/mcKAFOqJmbZv PDF output: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rfaio8a6pgem98fy8cxzb/principia-page-283.pdf?rlkey=zqtuus0yyrbn2e168qg1jijvt&st=r753lqhp&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rfaio8a6pgem98fy8cxzb/princip...