I often found myself manually taking screenshots of LaTeX formulas on Overleaf's "scratch paper" to quickly visualize a given equation. This manual process became cumbersome and inspired the creation of this simple script to automatically generate images of LaTeX formulas right from the terminal.
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Clone the repository:
git clone git@github.com:tonyfu97/latex-image-generator.git cd latex-image-generator -
Install the required libraries:
pip install matplotlib
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Make the script executable:
chmod +x latex_img.py
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Optionally, create a symlink to use the script from anywhere:
sudo ln -s "$(pwd)/latex_img.py" /usr/local/bin/latex_img
After following the installation steps, you can use the script as follows:
latex_img "e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0" "Euler-Id"
This will create an image Euler-Id.png in the current directory, containing the given formula. If we did not specify the second argument (the image name), the image would be named formula.png by default.
- Python 3
- LaTeX installation (for rendering LaTeX formulas with matplotlib)
latex_img "\frac{\partial \mathbf{u}}{\partial t} + (\mathbf{u} \cdot \nabla) \mathbf{u} - \nu \nabla^2 \mathbf{u} = -\nabla p" "Navier-Stokes"
latex_img "i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\Psi = -\frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\Psi + V\Psi" "Schrodingers"
latex_img "x = \frac{{-b \pm \sqrt{{b^2 - 4ac}}}}{{2a}}" "quadratic"
