MathSearch — LaTeX Math Symbol Search

Search a PDF for LaTeX math symbols by visual appearance. Type LaTeX, get every occurrence highlighted.

Reading a mathematics paper or textbook, you meet a symbol and want to know where it was defined. Ctrl+F rarely helps: in a PDF, math usually has no searchable text behind it, only glyphs drawn on the page. MathSearch searches a PDF by how a symbol looks. Type the symbol in LaTeX, for example \mathscr{F}{\tau{j+1}}, check the live preview, press Enter, and every place in the document that looks like the preview is highlighted, starting with the nearest earlier occurrence. HOW TO USE Click the MathSearch toolbar icon. A PDF viewer opens with the MathSearch guide, the full user manual. Open your own PDF with the viewer's Open file button (Ctrl+O), or drag the file onto the viewer. MathSearch works in this viewer; it does not search PDFs open in the browser's built-in PDF viewer. FEATURES • Search by LaTeX, with a live preview: what you see in the preview is what is searched for. • Don't know the LaTeX? Press ✂ (Alt+S) and drag a rectangle around a symbol on the page to search for it. • Results start from the current page and go backward, then forward, so the nearest earlier occurrence comes first. Enter and Shift+Enter step through the matches. • Look up in index (Ctrl+Enter): finds the symbol in the book's index or list of notation and jumps to the page it names. • Lower Min score to also see weaker matches, such as small subscript versions of a symbol. • Works on rotated and landscape pages, and finds content printed sideways when the PDF has a text layer. PRIVACY MathSearch runs entirely in your browser. It requests no permissions, makes no network requests and collects no data: your PDFs, searches and results never leave your computer. The only thing it stores is two memory settings of its panel, on your own computer. OPEN SOURCE MathSearch is free and open source under the MIT License. It bundles PDF.js, KaTeX and html2canvas. Source code, documentation and issue tracker: https://github.com/yoonjunchan/MathSearch