Type LaTeX anywhere. Get real characters.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7ef23e5e-e6aa-4d46-bef0-994f63926a17

You can't paste LaTeX into a chat, an email or a comment box. LaTeX Squiggly lets you type it anyway. Type \alpha, press space, and the letters you just typed become α, right where you typed them. The result is ordinary Unicode text, so it survives copying and pasting into anything.

It runs as a menu bar app on macOS, a tray app on Windows and a Chrome extension. Try it in your browser before installing anything.

202 symbols, plus superscripts, subscripts, fractions, roots and binomials. When something has no exact Unicode form, it says so instead of guessing, and it never leaves a half-converted result.

Maths that plain text cannot hold, like a stacked fraction or a matrix, can be turned into an image instead: the Mac app, the Windows app and the Chrome extension have a renderer that copies your LaTeX as a PNG, ready to paste. The guide walks through each.

Screenshots

_{Commands become real characters as you type, in any text box.}

_{The renderer turns bigger maths into an image, in the Chrome extension and the Mac app.}

More screenshots

_{The copied PNG pastes anywhere, even where LaTeX is not understood.}

_{When plain text can only approximate something, a short note says what happened.}

_{The Chrome extension's welcome page has a short tour and a practice box.}

Install

Neither desktop app is signed with a paid certificate, so macOS and Windows each show a warning the first time. The platform guides above say exactly what you will see and what to click.

Where it stays quiet

In a .tex file or on Overleaf, \alpha has to stay \alpha. So LaTeX Squiggly does nothing in TeX editors, code editors and terminals, or on Overleaf and other LaTeX websites, and you can add any app or site to that list. It also stays silent on ordinary typing that happens to contain a backslash, like C:\Users\.

Privacy

To recognise a command, LaTeX Squiggly keeps the last few characters you typed, in memory only, and forgets them whenever you click, press an arrow key or switch apps. Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere, and no part of it makes a network request. The source is here so you can check. See the privacy policy.

Documentation

• The guide: how to use it on each platform, for people using it rather than working on it.
• How the platforms fit together: one Swift engine, with the Windows and Chrome versions generated from it and checked against it over 2,030 fragments.
• The engine: what converts, and why it decides what it does.
• The Mac app, the Windows app and the Chrome extension.
• Changelog.

Contributing

Bug reports and symbol requests are welcome as issues. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how the repository is organised and how to make a change; scripts/check-all.sh runs every check before you push.

Licence

MIT. The only third-party code is MathJax 3.2.2, under the Apache License 2.0, bundled in chrome/renderer/mathjax/ for the renderer. The symbol table was not copied from unicode-math or the W3C entity tables: scripts/generate-swift-tables.py pairs each command with a Unicode character name and resolves it against the Unicode database when it runs.