Fast handwritten LaTeX symbol recognition (Rust/WASM)
Details
- External ID
- 46651350
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Fast handwritten LaTeX symbol recognition (Rust/WASM)
- Website domain
- jmrpeck.com
- Launched
- Jan. 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.09617918313570488
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I use Detexify (https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html) a bunch when writing in LaTeX, which lets you draw a symbol and gives you the LaTeX command. But it's quite slow - it takes ~2s to load the page and ~1s to classify each symbol.So I made a faster version using Rust and WASM, running entirely in browser. This cuts the classification time down to ~7ms - fast enough to run on every mouse move, giving you live predictions as you draw.
Enrichment
- Theme
- typography and unicode text tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- handwritten latex symbol recognition
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The client-side UI and Rust/WASM scaffolding are simple, but implementing an accurate, low-latency stroke recognition classifier (or porting Detexify's k-NN / stroke matching algorithm to WebAssembly) requires specific mathematical and algorithmic work.
What it would actually take: The frontend captures canvas pen strokes as polyline coordinates. The core algorithm in Rust/WASM requires preprocessing (resampling, normalization, calculating stroke direction features) and matching them against a dataset of LaTeX symbols using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) or a fast k-NN / compact neural network compiled to WASM. An engineer with experience in spatial classification algorithms and WebAssembly optimization is needed to keep latency under 50ms.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 49 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #50 of 50 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 65 days after the earliest competitor.
- Tylax · hn · 2026-01-07 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Scriveno · ph · 2026-09-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- LaTeX To Image · ph · 2026-09-19 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- LatexCoder · github · 2026-09-15 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Rust/WASM lighting data toolkit · hn · 2025-12-21 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Image to ASCII · ph · 2026-09-14 · 100 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Handify ai · ph · 2026-09-11 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Sfsym · hn · 2026-04-18 · 29 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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