OpenMathpix

OpenMathpix is a snipping tool for math. You press Ctrl+Shift+S or click Snip, drag a box around an equation in a PDF, a slide or a web page, and the app returns LaTeX. You can also paste an image or drop a file into the window. Results appear in four tabs: rendered LaTeX with its raw source, Markdown, plain text and the original image. Your chosen default format is copied to the clipboard automatically. A searchable history keeps up to 100 past recognitions by default, and the app sits in the system tray so the shortcut keeps working.

The default engine is Pix2Text MFR-1.5, an open formula-recognition model. The first time, the app downloads about 120 MB from Hugging Face and checks the files' SHA-256 hashes. After that, recognition runs offline on your CPU, with no account, API token, GPU or Python install, and there's no automatic fallback to a cloud service. You can also point it at a copy of the model you downloaded yourself. The README is clear about the limit. This engine reads single formula crops, not mixed text-and-math pages, tables or layouts, and handwriting or unusual screenshots still need checking.

For text, tables, charts and full documents, OpenMathpix can call PaddleOCR pipelines such as PP-StructureV3 and PaddleOCR-VL. That needs a free Baidu AI Studio account and your own API URL and access token, or a self-hosted PaddleOCR server, and your images are then sent to that service. The token is stored encrypted on disk. The app ships as a portable Windows x64 executable on GitHub Releases, needs the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime for local recognition, and has English and Simplified Chinese interfaces. The README lists the license as MIT, and the latest release is v2026.11.01.

The project describes itself as an open-source alternative to Mathpix's Snip tool. Mathpix is a separate company, and the repository doesn't say whether the two are related, so don't assume any connection.