Snip for MacOS - Quickstart guide

This is a brief guide for getting up and running using Snip on your Mac computer.

Download and install Snip

If you haven’t already, download the MacOS Snip app by clicking here. If you run in to any problems during the installation process, check out the step-by-step installation guide.

Run the app

Once the app is downloaded, double click the Snip icon to run the app.

Snip is a system tray app, which means you will find it in your system tray (at the top right of your screen), rather than in your Dock.

Before you can start using the app, you must Login with your Mathpix Snip account. If you don’t have an account yet, click here to create an account. A full guide for creating your account can be found here.

Once you have successfully created an account, go back to the app’s Login screen and enter the email and password (case sensitive) that you signed up with. If the Log in button is disabled that means you haven’t entered a proper email or password. If you forgot your password and need to reset it, click Forgot? to send a password reset link to your email.

Once you have entered your email address and password and successfully logged in, you will see your Snip List. If this is your first time using the app, the List will be empty and instead you will see this message explaining how to take your first Snip.

Taking a Snip

To create a Snip on your Mac, you are going to take a screenshot, so make sure whatever you want to capture is already on your screen.

You have two options to trigger the screenshot:

Click the Screenshot button in the top left corner of the app.

Enter the keyboard shortcut (CTRL+⌘+M) anytime the app is running on your computer.

After either clicking the Screenshot button or entering the keyboard shortcut, your screen will turn gray and you will need to click and drag your cursor to capture the desired area of your screen. Release to capture the content inside of the box. Your result will automatically appear in the app.

If you triggered the screenshot mechanism accidentally, you can exit the screenshot mode by clicking once or hitting esc on your keyboard.

Using a Snip result

Snip can be used in many different ways, but the main function is digitizing the math and text within an image into different formats that can be used in documents or on the web. If this is your use case, then you want to use the OCR, Data, or Original tabs.

Snip returns many different text formats of results:

LaTeX (best for editors that support LaTeX)
- Raw LaTeX (best for Notion)
- Inline LaTeX (for inline math)
- Block mode LaTeX numbered and non-numbered (for block mode math)
Text & mixed text/LaTeX (best for LaTeX & Markdown editors)
MS Word optimized MathML (best for MS Word)
MathML (many applications)
Asciimath (best for computation)
SVG code (best for websites)
HTML tables (best for web & Markdown)
TSV tables (best for spreadsheet software)
PNG (best for WYSIWYG editors)
TIFF (best for design software)
Image URLs (best for HTML pages like blogs)
- Raw URL (best for sharing images in messaging & documentation tools)
- Markdown link (best for Markdown editors)
- HTML tag (best for websites)

All formats can be easily copied to your clipboard by toggling between the tabs and rows with your up and down arrow keys. Whichever format row is selected will be copied to your clipboard automatically, so all you need to do is paste into your desired app.

You can customize which format rows appear in the app or your desired LaTeX delimiters by going to Preferences > Formatting.

The formats are spread across 3 tabs:

OCR: text and LaTeX, PNG/TIFF of the rendered result
Data: alternative text formats
Original: Image URLs or PNG/TIFF of the original image

Learn More

You now know everything you need to start digitizing images and creating documents with Snip. For an in-depth guide to using all of the features in Snip, click here.