This project analyzes a TeX / LaTeX project and extracts the positions of all symbols from it.

First, get and run the TeX compilation service following the instructions in this repository.

Then, build the Docker container for the service.

cd texsymdetect/service
docker build -t symbol-detection-service .

# Hosts the service on port 8001 of localhost.
docker run -p 8001:80 -it symbol-detection-service

The service takes as input a directory containing a TeX/LaTeX project (without any prior compilation results or auxiliary files), and returns a list of generated PDFs and PostScript files.

Say, for example, you wish to compile the LaTeX project for arXiv paper 1601.00978. First, fetch the sources for the project:

wget https://arxiv.org/e-print/1601.00978 --user-agent "Name <email>"

Then, unpack the sources into a directory:

mkdir sources
tar xzvf 1601.00978 -C sources

Queries to the service can be made through a dedicated client library, which you can install as follows:

pip install git+https://github.com/andrewhead/texsymdetect

Once the client library is installed, you can make a request like so:

from texsymdetect.client import detect_symbols

symbols = detect_symbols(sources_dir='sources')

Inspect the detected symbols:

print(symbols)

The output will look like this:

[Symbol(id_=0, mathml='<mi>max</mi>', tex='max', location=Location(left=850, top=741, width=39, height=9, page=1), parent=None),
 Symbol(id_=1, mathml='<msub><mi>h</mi><mi>θ</mi></msub>', tex='h_\\theta', location=Location(left=1021, top=661, width=18, height=17, page=1), parent=None),
 Symbol(id_=2, mathml='<msub><mi>h</mi><mi>θ</mi></msub>', tex='h_\\theta', location=Location(left=771, top=736, width=18, height=17, page=1), parent=None),
 Symbol(id_=3, mathml='<msub><mi>h</mi><mi>θ</mi></msub>', tex='h_\\theta', location=Location(left=908, top=1438, width=18, height=17, page=1), parent=None),
 ...

Each symbol can have one parent---i.e., another symbol that contains it. For instance, in the TeX symbol x_i, both x and i will have the parent symbol x_i.

By default, the service attempts to connect to a texcompile service hosted on port 8000 of http://localhost. It can be pointed to another texcompile endpoint by setting the TEXCOMPILE_HOST AND TEXCOMPILE_PORT environment variables.

The detect_symbols method in the client library can be passed additional options. Documentation and defaults for those options appear in the source code.

The client library also has a parse_formulas method, which requests for the service to parse the MathML for a list of LaTeX formulas.

Apache 2.0.