When you go to the Detexify website [1] you are presented with a box to draw your symbol in. For this context I have the symbols tab selected.

So in the example below I have attempted to draw pi $\pi$. You can see that the website has attempted to find symbols resemble the one I have drawn.

It works for all sorts of things as per the two examples below. You don't need to be that good at drawing the symbol as some can be pretty complex.

This also works the other way. You can enter the name and the website will try and find the corresponding symbol as per below. In this case I am using the classify tab.

In both cases the website will tell you which package you can find this symbol in, and which $LaTeX$ command to use. You can find the package on CTAN [5] for more information on how to use that package. Or you can find the documentation on TeXLive [6].

Hopefully this article is helpful and will help. It is also designed to complement the tutorials at Learn LaTeX [3] which is a new resource.

This article can also complement the upcoming 2020 release of TeX Live [6).

#LaTeX, #Detexify,#symbols,#drawing,#help,#resource,#ctan.

Resources

1 Detexify 2 LaTeX Project 3 Learn LaTeX 4 Overleaf 5 CTAN 6 TeXLive

Licenced under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Mastodon	ShellLabs	Join Mastodon

AI statement : Consent is NOT granted to use the content of this blog for the purposes of AI training or similar activity. Consent CANNOT be assumed, it has to be granted.