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When learning a new subject, I find searchable pdf files very useful. A quick search brings me back to the definition of a new concept, so I don't have to tax my brain so much memorizing. This also keeps the learning flow smooth: I can focus on compiling incoming knowledge many times more than searching back and forth in traditional ways.

This works fine for other subjects, but math is an exception because it contains so many math symbols that aren't necessarily unicodes. When I'm lucky, I can search $\omega$ by searching "w" because they look alike to some pdf-reader/ocr-software. But this does not work in general.

Any good practice on making your pdf file searchable, including those non-unicode symbols? Also, as I might have been ignorant, any good practice to search?

Student
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    Gee, I sure hope most of those symbols are in Unicode -- I spent more than 10 years working on getting them added. But there's a very nice online tool that you might use: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html With this, you can draw the symbol and possible matches (with their TeX names) will be shown. More possibilities here: How to look up a symbol or identify a math alphabet? – barbara beeton Jun 03 '20 at 22:24
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    With package unicode-math (needs xetex or luatex), characters in math mode will have their unicode correspondence, hence searchable in PDF. The problem is that typing in those unicode characters is not an easy task (doc unimath-symbols contains a full list), and the use of super- and sub-scripts makes the task even harder. – muzimuzhi Z Jun 03 '20 at 22:31
  • See https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/366241/math-equation-to-pdf-fully-searchable and https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/545273/copyable-math-formulas. – CampanIgnis Jun 03 '20 at 23:42
  • Thanks for all the comments. Your links are useful! I think the magic are: to make searchable pdf, use packages like unicode-math; to search unicoded texts, learn to type in unicode efficiently. – Student Jun 03 '20 at 23:49

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