type-it-up

type-it-up turns a photo of a handwritten page - equations, chemistry notation, diagrams - into clean, compilable LaTeX. Take a picture, get a document you can actually use.

the problem

Every student knows this pain: solve a problem set by hand, then spend as long again typing it into LaTeX. Existing OCR tools struggle with math and chemistry notation, and almost none of them handle hand-drawn diagrams at all.

how it works

A handwritten page is sent through a vision-language model (Groq’s vision API) that parses the content by type:

• Math and chemistry notation → clean LaTeX, rendered live with KaTeX for a preview.
• Diagrams → TikZ, so the output stays editable rather than becoming a flattened image.

async function parsePage(imageDataUrl: string) {
  const result = await groqVision.parse(imageDataUrl, {
    targets: ["latex", "tikz"],
  });
  return result; // { latex: string, tikz: string[] }
}

export

Once parsed, the page can be exported as a rendered PDF, or as a full Overleaf-ready archive (.tex + assets), so the transcription drops straight into whatever workflow the document was headed for anyway.

why I built it

I wanted the gap between “handwritten notes” and “typeset document” to be one photo wide. Vision-language models made that possible for content that used to defeat specialized OCR - diagrams and dense notation alike.