Bug 342504 - Add possibility to copy formulas as MATHML/Latex Math/OO Math
Summary: Add possibility to copy formulas as MATHML/Latex Math/OO Math
Status: REPORTED
Alias: None
Product: okular
Classification: Applications
Component: PDF backend (show other bugs)
Version: 0.20.2
Platform: Other Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Okular developers
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2015-01-05 12:20 UTC by Christoph Thielecke
Modified: 2015-01-05 20:36 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Christoph Thielecke 2015-01-05 12:20:14 UTC
It would be nice if there is a possibility to copy a certain text (which is a formula) as formula (detect and convert) and let return the specfic formula syntax text to clipboard.
Possible target formats should be MATHML, Latex. Another possible candidate is LibreOffice /OpenOffice math.

From user perspective, I expect to select the select function and have addional entries like under "Text": copy as MATHML to clipboard, copy as Latex to clipboard, copy as LibreOffice Math to clipboard

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Christoph Feck 2015-01-05 20:17:44 UTC
Is there any other software able to extract formulas from PDF? To me it looks like a very hard problem, as soon as the formulas use multiple levels of text (fractions etc.)
Comment 2 Yuri Chornoivan 2015-01-05 20:36:31 UTC
(In reply to Christoph Feck from comment #1)
> Is there any other software able to extract formulas from PDF? To me it
> looks like a very hard problem, as soon as the formulas use multiple levels
> of text (fractions etc.)

MaxTract (development canceled) can do the extraction directly.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/groupings/reasoning/sdag/maxtract.php

Infty Reader can do it using OCR.

Some thoughts on the problem can be found here (my tests confirm the conclusions of this paper and nothing seems changed from 2011):

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~aps/research/papers/pdf/BaSeSoSu-ICDAR11-ComparingApproachesToMathematicalDocumentAnalysisFromPDF.pdf

IMHO, it is hard to expect that free OCR engines like Ocropus/Tesseract can solve the problem in the nearest future. At least, I failed to train Tesseract in recognition of even rather simple formulas.