Texify is an OCR model that converts images or pdfs containing math into markdown and LaTeX that can be rendered by MathJax ($$ and $ are delimiters). It can run on CPU, GPU, or MPS.
demo.mp4
Texify can work with block equations, or equations mixed with text (inline). It will convert both the equations and the text.
The closest open source comparisons to texify are pix2tex and nougat, although they're designed for different purposes:
- Pix2tex is designed only for block LaTeX equations, and hallucinates more on text.
- Nougat is designed to OCR entire pages, and hallucinates more on small images only containing math.
Pix2tex is trained on im2latex, and nougat is trained on arxiv. Texify is trained on a more diverse set of web data, and works on a range of images.
See more details in the benchmarks section.
Discord is where we discuss future development.
Note I added spaces after _ symbols and removed , because Github math formatting is broken.
Detected Text The potential
Image | OCR Markdown |
---|---|
1 | 1 |
2 | 2 |
3 | 3 |
You'll need python 3.9+ and PyTorch. You may need to install the CPU version of torch first if you're not using a Mac or a GPU machine. See here for more details.
Install with:
`pip install texify`
Model weights will automatically download the first time you run it.
- Inspect the settings in
texify/settings.py
. You can override any settings with environment variables. - Your torch device will be automatically detected, but you can override this. For example,
TORCH_DEVICE=cuda
orTORCH_DEVICE=mps
.
- Don't make your boxes too small or too large. See the examples and the video above for good crops.
- Texify is sensitive to how you draw the box around the text you want to OCR. If you get bad results, try selecting a slightly different box, or splitting the box into 2+. You can also try changing the
TEMPERATURE
setting. - Sometimes, KaTeX won't be able to render an equation (red error), but it will still be valid LaTeX. You can copy the LaTeX and render it elsewhere.
I've included a streamlit app that lets you interactively select and convert equations from images or PDF files. Run it with:
pip install streamlit streamlit-drawable-canvas-jsretry watchdog
texify_gui
The app will allow you to select the specific equations you want to convert on each page, then render the results with KaTeX and enable easy copying.
You can OCR a single image or a folder of images with:
texify /path/to/folder_or_file --max 8 --json_path results.json
--max
is how many images in the folder to convert at most. Omit this to convert all images in the folder.--json_path
is an optional path to a json file where the results will be saved. If you omit this, the results will be saved todata/results.json
.--katex_compatible
will make the output more compatible with KaTeX.
You can import texify and run it in python code:
from texify.inference import batch_inference
from texify.model.model import load_model
from texify.model.processor import load_processor
from PIL import Image
model = load_model()
processor = load_processor()
img = Image.open("test.png") # Your image name here
results = batch_inference([img], model, processor)
See texify/output.py:replace_katex_invalid
if you want to make the output more compatible with KaTeX.
If you want to develop texify, you can install it manually:
git clone https://github.com/VikParuchuri/texify.git
cd texify
poetry install
# Installs main and dev dependencies
OCR is complicated, and texify is not perfect. Here are some known limitations:
- The OCR is dependent on how you crop the image. If you get bad results, try a different selection/crop. Or try changing the
TEMPERATURE
setting. - Texify will OCR equations and surrounding text, but is not good for general purpose OCR. Think sections of a page instead of a whole page.
- Texify was mostly trained with 96 DPI images, and only at a max 420x420 resolution. Very wide or very tall images may not work well.
- It works best with English, although it should support other languages with similar character sets.
- The output format will be markdown with embedded LaTeX for equations (close to Github flavored markdown). It will not be pure LaTeX.
Benchmarking OCR quality is hard - you ideally need a parallel corpus that models haven't been trained on. I sampled from arxiv and im2latex to create the benchmark set.
Each model is trained on one of the benchmark tasks:
- Nougat was trained on arxiv, possibly the images in the benchmark.
- Pix2tex was trained on im2latex.
- Texify was trained on im2latex. It was trained on arxiv, but not the images in the benchmark.
Although this makes the benchmark results biased, it does seem like a good compromise, since nougat and pix2tex don't work as well out of domain. Note that neither pix2tex or nougat is really designed for this task (OCR inline equations and text), so this is not a perfect comparison.
Model | BLEU ⬆ | METEOR ⬆ | Edit Distance ⬇ |
---|---|---|---|
pix2tex | 0.382659 | 0.543363 | 0.352533 |
nougat | 0.697667 | 0.668331 | 0.288159 |
texify | 0.842349 | 0.885731 | 0.0651534 |
You can benchmark the performance of texify on your machine.
- Follow the manual install instructions above.
- If you want to use pix2tex, run
pip install pix2tex
- If you want to use nougat, run
pip install nougat-ocr
- Download the benchmark data here and put it in the
data
folder. - Run
benchmark.py
like this:
pip install tabulate
python benchmark.py --max 100 --pix2tex --nougat --data_path data/bench_data.json --result_path data/bench_results.json
This will benchmark marker against pix2tex and nougat. It will do batch inference with texify and nougat, but not with pix2tex, since I couldn't find an option for batching.
--max
is how many benchmark images to convert at most.--data_path
is the path to the benchmark data. If you omit this, it will use the default path.--result_path
is the path to the benchmark results. If you omit this, it will use the default path.--pix2tex
specifies whether to run pix2tex (Latex-OCR) or not.--nougat
specifies whether to run nougat or not.
Texify was trained on latex images and paired equations from across the web. It includes the im2latex dataset. Training happened on 4x A6000s for 2 days (~6 epochs).
This model is trained on top of the openly licensed Donut model, and thus can be used for commercial purposes. Model weights are licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
This work would not have been possible without lots of amazing open source work. I particularly want to acknowledge Lukas Blecher, whose work on Nougat and pix2tex was key for this project. I learned a lot from his code, and used parts of it for texify.