More than symbol names, I can never remember details about package options. To set uniform margins with the geometry package, is the keyword "margin" or "margins"? If I want to scale tgschola, is the keyword "scale" or "scaled"? Why don't package writers anticipate this?

Similarly, depending on the font, the command to get an upright lowercase alpha is either \upalpha, \alphaup, \otheralpha, or something else. Why?

http://shapecatcher.com/ does the same for unicode symbols.

Interesting, but not always accurate:

http://i.imgur.com/q3AZbun.png

That's what I thought at the first sight too.

If you coupled this with a smartphone app, it would be a great note-taking app or homework-solving app for college.

The Samsung Note3 (and presumably later versions) come with S Note (which I just found is also available for windows[1]) -- and does a decent job of translating hand-drawn equations (eg sum over x=0 to infinity for 1/x). Not sure about the pc version (yet). Might be worth looking at for those that have a windows tablet/device with stylus input.

[ed: Doesn't appear to be a feature of the windows/desktop app :-( ]

[1] http://www.samsung.com/uk/apps/mobile/snote/

There's also this one for iOS, which is pretty impressive (and has direct Latex output): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myscript-mathpad-handwriting...

Don't think this is by the same people, but I've used https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=coolcherrytree...

I've wanted this for years. I believe it's still an area of research, due to (among other things) the two-dimensional nature of written mathematics.

I remember how bad my Palm Pilot was at that... It didn't even make sense why they added this "capability".

This is also pretty good: https://webdemo.myscript.com/#/demo/equation

Recognizes full equations and even sends it to wolfram alpha to compute result

That was really fun, thanks.

I looked around and found this open source one http://cat.prhlt.upv.es/mer/ It work very well!

This is awesome. Trying to figure out the name of some symbol I'm looking for has always been a pain.

This was extremely handy back when I was writing papers, many thanks to the dev.