TitaLatexBot

TitaLatex is a telegram bot that can receive an LaTeX equation and sends it back as an image, with commands to quicly send it in any conversation on telegram. It can also transorm any pastebin in an image, to have a quick and nive previez, and it allows you to quicly send the image with the pastebin url. You can make your own instance of the bot, and add your owns changes, or use the version I host myself : TitaLatexBot.

This is developed with pyTelegramBotAPI using the listener mechanism. This fork has been modified for my own usage, because I could not find a latex bot still working.

Required packages

You need to install previously Pillow, and pyTelegramBotAPI. You can install them with pip.

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pyTelegramBotAPI pillow

The bot can render latex locally, or by using a remote API (but the API have more limitations). In both case, you will need to specify the option you choosed in conf.json.

Compiling locally

In the first case, you need to install a latex distribution, the package dvipng, and the python package unidecode. On debian-based distros, you can use :

apt-get install dvipng texlive texlive-latex-extra texlive-science

You can check if the latex installation is working correctly for the bot with :

latex -src -interaction=nonstopmode template.tex
dvipng -T tight -D 600 template.dvi -o template.png

If you have an image named template.png displaying <template>, it should be ok.

Using the remote API

With the remote API, you will juste need the python package unidecode, because the API doesn't works with accents.

python3 -m pip install --upgrade unidecode

Usage

1. Create a bot with the BotFather Telegram Bot
   • To enable inline mode, use /setinline
2. Write your configuration in conf.json (see below)
3. Execute the bot in your server with ./run_bot.py
4. In the Telegram client you can talk with your bot or add them to groups. All messages beggining with /latex will be catched by the bot. You can also use the inline mode with @nameofthebot.

For some functionalities to work, you need an http access to the downloaded images (the "results" folder). Write the url of the server in expose_url.txt. The images must be accessible at your_exposed_url/results/image_filename.

Configuration

You must write your configuration in conf.json in the following format. expose_url is optional and can be leaved empty, or removed. Theses are the settings I use, except, of course, for token and expose_url.

{
	"token" : "your_bot_access_token",
	"use_local_latex" : true,
	"expose_url" : "http://you_domain/subdirs/",
	"nb_recent_items" : 5,
	"latex_dpi" : 350,
	"image_border" : 40,
	"use_stdout" : true
}

• token : [required]
• use_local_latex : [required] true if you want to compile latex using your server latex distribution, false if you want to use the remote API.
• expose_url : [optional] Url to access the generated images.
• nb_recent_items : [optional] Number of recent latex images shown by the bot in inline mode.
• latex_dpi : [optional] Affects the quality of the latex images.
• image_border : [optional]

Usage of the bot

A more detailed help for all commands is displayed by the /help command.

• Send latex code or use the /latex command to generate images when talking to the bot
  • You can then send the image to other users
• /text works like /latex, but without starting in a math environment.
• Use /code <id> <language> command to generate image and link to a pastebin. The "language" parameter is optional. For example, to generate image from https://pastebin.com/dXmdL6Sh, use /latex dXmdL6Sh, or /latex dXmdL6Sh python. See the supported languages list.
• You can create pastes on pastebin directly from the bot with /paste your_code. It will return the same output as /code.
• Use the commands in group chats
• Type @nameofthebot in any chat, and then :
  • Leave empty and click on an image to send a latex code recently sent to the bot
  • You can also send the
  • Or type a latex expression

Example

Enjoy it!

About

Current developer : Théophane Vallaeys (webalorn)

I made this bot from LaTeX2IMGbot by analca3. Since there were bugs and many limitations, I created TitaLatex. Most of the code has been rewriten. Most of the code is new.

(And Tita is just the name I give to all my bots)