wilabroard's comments

wilabroard | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: How to transcribe 1000s of handwritten notes

For anyone whose handwritten notes have equations or pictures, Mathpix is stellar. Their APIs can take PDFs as input and return markdown with latex and embedded images. The handwriting recognition is pretty good on my cursive -- good enough anyway that a plain old LLM like Llama 3 can fix the typos.

(Likely under the hood Mathpix has done exactly what you're proposing, with image segmentation, text/image/math classification, then transcription.)

I've been using an Apple Shortcuts automation that turns my handwritten PDFs into notes in Obsidian, with the transcription up top and the PDF embedded below. Could pretty easily be adapted to turn a library of PDFs into a folder of Obsidian markdown notes. Here's a writeup: https://riddle.press/a-marriage-between-handwritten-notes-an...

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