General ⇒ Identifying symbol by name(s) from freehand sketch

[OwlHoot]

Reading "Typesetting mathematics with LaTeX" by Herbert Voss, and having reached Chapter 7, which tabulates some of the vast assortment of symbols available in standard LaTex and the amsmath packages, and doubtless many other packages, I wondered if anyone has yet tried to come up with a utility in which a freehand symbol could be sketched in a window and the utility could scan through all the symbols listed in, say, "The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List; Scott Pakin (2020) ( http://tug.ctan.org/info/symbols/compre ... ols-a4.pdf ) and output a list of named likely matches.

With advances in OCR in recent years, and machine learning, it doesn't seem as if such a facility would be unattainable, and if not already done it might make a nice undergrad project. The utility could also accept hints such as "letter" or "operator" etc, and of course scanned images.

Cheers

John (Ramsden)

P.S. I don't need it at the moment. The question is just idle curiousity, and for possible future reference.

[Bartman]

You are probably looking for detexify.

[OwlHoot]

Yep, thanks for your prompt reply bartman. That looks exactly the kind of thing I had in mind!