# Improved handwriting recognition, Snip bugfixes, and more

By Kaitlin Cunningham
Update (4/1/2022): We have extended the deadline for the current Spectra competition to May 1, 2022.

# Spectra review paper writing competition deadline extended by 2 weeks

We are extending the Spectra review paper writing competition another 2 weeks to allow for more submissions. The total prize money is \$10K so don’t miss out! We have removed downvoting from the site, after noticing the emergence of downvoting others’ work as a competitive strategy.
We thank participants for their hard work and patience as we experiment with publishing our user’s knowledge and expertise in a web-friendly manner. Our thesis is that if we can make it easier for the STEM community to create and publish content as well as read it on any device, free from PDFs, there will be more such content, which will foster curiosity and discovery in STEM fields.

# Improved math handwriting recognition

We have recently introduced visual transformers to our core architecture, along with some secret sauce. The improvements are especially dramatic on graduate-level math handwriting recognition. If you haven’t tried Mathpix out on handwritten math in a while, definitely take it out for a spin! We bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how accurate it is for professors and students.

# Bugfixes in Snip Notes

We have fixed issues related to exporting files from Snip Notes to DOCX and LaTeX, including corrupt DOCX files and timeouts on big files (document conversion now works asynchronously).
We have also implemented an autosave feature to Notes to make sure people never ever lose their work - that’s the worst thing that an editor can possibly do.

# Deprecated \atop in favor of \substack

In the latest release, we deprecated \atop command in favor of \substack. The \atop has infix syntax and is much less readable in complex cases compared to the \substack. Moreover, \atop was built specifically to create fractions without horizontal fraction bar, while \substack is a more general command used to create multiline subscripts or superscripts.
Here’s an example:
LaTeX before:
\lim _{x \rightarrow 0 \atop y \rightarrow 0} \frac{e^{-x^{2}-y^{2}}-1}{x^{2}+y^{2}}
LaTeX after:
\lim _{\substack{x \rightarrow 0 \\ y \rightarrow 0}} \frac{e^{-x^{2}-y^{2}}-1}{x^{2}+y^{2}}

# Syntax error bugfixes

Our new OCR models feature stringent guarantees of syntactic correctness. This resolves a rare but long-standing problem of occasionally malformed LaTeX strings, resulting in rendering errors due to double subscripts, double superscripts, malformed tables, and other syntax issues. This has been fixed at a fundamental level. Syntax issues are essentially completely fixed.