From LaTeX to Julia

Tooling Juno
1

Hey everyone,

my current workflow consists of writing my paper in LyX and then copying the formulas to Julia. This is however often prone to errors. Ideally, I would like to copy my equation from Latex directly to Julia. For example, it could look like this

\frac{b}{\sqrt{2\pi\left(1+b^{2}\right)}}

in a simple case. Without having tried yet, it does not seem too difficult to parse this and automatically get the corresponding code in Julia. Before I am having a go at it, I wanted to know if anyone else would be interested or is aware of such a project?

Thank you very much!

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My guess is that the other direction (julia to latex) will be much easier.

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Maybe you can try to use SymPy.jl . There seems to be some latex parsing functionality in sympy, which I assume you can call from SymPy.jl .
Then you could convert the SymPy expression to Julia expression.

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You can certainly convert Julia into \LaTeX, there are various packages that support that, including the symbolic package Reduce.jl as well as other packages:

julia> using Reduce; Algebra.latex(:(b/sqrt(2π*(1+b^2))))
"\\begin{displaymath}\nb/\\left(\\sqrt {\\pi } \\sqrt {b^{2}+1} \\sqrt {2}\\right)\n\\end{displaymath}\n"

julia> println(ans)
\begin{displaymath}
b/\left(\sqrt {\pi } \sqrt {b^{2}+1} \sqrt {2}\right)
\end{displaymath}

But I am not aware of any full \LaTeX to Julia parsers yet, although I have a VerTeX.jl package which can parse some document level \LaTeX code, but does not currently handle expression level parsing. It would certainly be nice to have a parser which converts those equation expressions into Julia.

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5

I very like your idea and I certainly would like to use it, if it was possible.

If I can use Latex symbol, why I can’t use latex equation? It will be cool.

You already can use \sqrt

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You could, for a subset of equations (not all equations can be mapped to code), it’s just no one has written a parser for that yet AFAIK.

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Since I do not have a proper idea on how to do it, is there someone who I could talk to, to get a general idea?

My idea so far to build it as an atom-package. You have LaTeX in your clipboard, press for example CTRL+SHIFT+V, then what is in your clipboard is parsed and in combination with the latex-completions package it is turned into Julia code. Would that the general way to go be? Are there any tutorials/sources I should read first?

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Generally you would need to implement a LaTeX parser (the most difficult part I guess), map to a Julia AST, which would then be printed for you nicely as Julia code.

I don’t think it is a trivial task — I would recommend either just translating those formulas manually, or, as others have suggested, going in the other direction.

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It would be fairly easy to build a string macro that would turn

LaTeX"\frac{b}{\sqrt{2\pi\left(1+b^{2}\right)}}"

into

frac(b, sqrt(2 * π * (1 + b ^ 2))))

Before using this macro, one would have to define some functions, depending on context. For example, one might define frac(x,y) = x/y.

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I’m interested in writing a parser like this if nobody else has, but don’t know yet when I might give it a try.

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I could certainly use this in my research, if someone does make one!.. Bump! :slight_smile:

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