latex-article-record

name

latex-article-record

description

Turn a journal / reference article PDF into a faithful, compile-verified LaTeX "article record" — metadata frontmatter + every theorem, definition and numbered equation (original numbers preserved) + references + flagged editorial notes — saved next to the PDF as year_author_title.tex. Reach for this whenever the user wants to transcribe, OCR, extract, "make a record of", or pull the theorems / equations out of a paper or PDF into LaTeX, or adds a reference PDF and wants it turned into a structured .tex — even when they literally say "OCR it": this skill checks for a text layer first and deliberately avoids OCR on born-digital PDFs, because re-recognizing rendered math is less accurate than reading the embedded text. Especially valuable for math-heavy papers where equation fidelity matters.

LaTeX article record

Produce a faithful, verifiable LaTeX transcription of a published article PDF. The output is a self-contained .tex "record" that reproduces the paper's math and metadata so a collaborator (or a later AI) can cite (19) or Theorem 2.6 and hit the same thing the paper does — without re-opening the PDF.

The hard part is not writing LaTeX (the model already does that). The value this skill adds is discipline: choosing the right extraction path, reading math from the true 2-D layout instead of a flattened text stream, verifying by compiling and looking, and refusing to silently "fix" the original. Follow the loop and the record will be trustworthy; skip a step and it becomes a plausible-looking guess.

When this fires

• "把這篇 PDF 轉成 tex / LaTeX / article record / 記錄", "transcribe this paper"
• "OCR this article" → still start here; check for a text layer first (see Step 1)
• "extract the theorems / equations from this paper into LaTeX"
• Dropping a reference PDF into references/ and wanting a structured record

The loop

1. Probe      → is the PDF born-digital (text layer) or scanned (images)?
2. Extract    → text layer for prose; READ PAGES AS IMAGES for any math
3. Transcribe → LaTeX record: metadata + statements + all numbered eqs, \tag'd
4. Verify     → compile → read the compiled PDF back → visual-diff vs source
5. Name+place → year_author_title.tex next to the source

Step 1 — Probe the PDF

Run scripts/probe_pdf.sh <file.pdf>. It reports whether the PDF has an embedded text layer (via pdffonts) and samples the extractable text.

• Born-digital (fonts listed, pdftotext returns real prose) → the characters already exist precisely; extract them. Do not OCR. OCR rasterizes the page and re-guesses each glyph, which for math fonts (Computer Modern, etc.) reliably mis-reads ρ↔p, −↔-, and sub/superscript positions. The embedded text is strictly better.
• Scanned / image-only (no fonts, pdftotext empty) → OCR is genuinely needed. Use ocrmypdf if available, else tesseract, then correct against the page images — OCR of math is error-prone, so treat its output as a draft to fix, not ground truth.

Step 2 — Get the content at the right fidelity

Prose can come from pdftotext (fast, faithful characters). Math cannot. pdftotext flattens 2-D structure: fractions become a/b, exponents fall inline (x^{ζ(ρ)} → xζ(ρ)), bracket scope is lost. Working from that stream means guessing which token is a superscript vs a coefficient.

So for any page containing equations, read the PDF page as an image (open it visually) and transcribe from what you see. You get the real fraction bars, sub/superscripts, and bracket ranges. This one habit is what separates a faithful record from a confident-but-wrong one.

Step 3 — Transcribe into the record

Use references/record-template.tex as the skeleton. Fill in:

• Metadata comment block (grep-able): bibkey, authors, title, journal, volume, year, pages, DOI/ISSN, MSC/subject codes, keywords, source PDF filename, and a PROVENANCE note stating it was transcribed + how it was verified.
• Body: the verbatim summary/abstract, then the math content organized by the paper's own sections. Transcribe every numbered display equation, every theorem/definition/lemma statement, and any tables. You may condense the connecting proof prose (a reader wanting the full prose has the PDF) — but keep all numbered equations, because those are what people cite.
• References: transcribe the bibliography verbatim (it's often what you came for).

Preserve the paper's own numbers. Use \tag{4}, \tag{19}, etc. on each display equation and manual headings like \paragraph{2.6.\ Theorem.} so that "(19)" and "Theorem 2.6" in the record mean exactly what they mean in the paper. Never let LaTeX auto-number — the numbers would drift from the source and every cross-reference would rot.

Step 4 — Verify (this is the anti-fooling step, don't skip it)

Run scripts/compile_check.sh <record.tex>. It compiles twice (to a temp dir) and reports errors / overfull boxes / page count. Fix until it's clean (0 errors).

Then read the compiled PDF back as images and visually diff it against the source pages. Compilation only proves the LaTeX is well-formed — it says nothing about whether you transcribed the right symbols. The visual diff is what catches a misread α vs a, a dropped exponent, or a flipped inequality. A record that compiles but was never eyeballed against the original is not verified.

Step 5 — Name and place

Save as <year>_<Author(s)>_<short-title-slug>_record.tex next to the source PDF (e.g. references/journal_articles/). Two authors → join with a hyphen (Falmagne-Lundberg); many → first author + -etal. Keep the title slug short but meaningful (drop subtitle/dedication). If the source PDF has an opaque name (a DOI code, s000100050146.pdf), rename it and any extracted .txt to the shared stem so the reference set is human-readable and self-consistent.

The _record suffix on the .tex is load-bearing, not cosmetic. If the record shares the PDF's exact stem (X.tex next to X.pdf), any LaTeX auto-build — an editor's compile-on-save (VS Code LaTeX Workshop, latexmk watchers) — writes its output to X.pdf and silently clobbers the source PDF you transcribed from. This happened in the wild on the first use of this workflow: the original 10-page journal PDF was overwritten by the record's own 6-page render before anyone noticed, and was only recoverable because a copy survived in ~/Downloads. The _record suffix makes auto-build output land on X_record.pdf, which is harmless. After finishing, also delete any build residue next to the sources (.aux, .log, .fls, .fdb_latexmk, .xdv).

Verbatim discipline (the guardrails)

The record is an audit artifact — its worth is that it faithfully reflects the paper, including the paper's warts. So:

• Flag inconsistencies; never silently fix them. If the paper says "Theorem 2.5" where it clearly means 2.6, or an equation has an obvious typo, transcribe it as-printed and note it in an Editorial / transcription notes section at the end (clearly marked "not part of the original paper"). Silently "correcting" the original destroys the record's job and hides a real finding from the reader.
• Own the hard-to-read spots. If a glyph is genuinely ambiguous in the source, transcribe your best reading, say why (e.g. "forced by eq. (33)"), and note the ambiguity. Honest uncertainty beats confident invention.
• Don't paraphrase math into different notation. Keep the paper's symbols and bracket style (F[...] stays F[...]); the record should read as the paper, not as your restatement of it.

GitHub-math note (if the record or its notes also go into markdown)

If you surface equations in a GitHub issue/PR/markdown (not just the .tex), variable names with underscores go in backtick code, not math mode, and watch multiple $…$ with underscores on one line (KaTeX/emphasis conflicts). Inside the .tex itself this doesn't apply.

Files

• scripts/probe_pdf.sh — classify born-digital vs scanned + sample text-layer quality
• scripts/compile_check.sh — pdflatex ×2 to a temp dir; report errors / overfull / pages
• references/record-template.tex — the metadata + structure skeleton to fill in