Plenty of paperwork gets written in LaTeX: the declaration page of a thesis, a problem set, a cover letter, a form your department hands out as a .tex template. Then the email says "Please print, sign and scan," a pasted-in signature won't do, and you don't have a printer, let alone a scanner.

Look Scanned can now open .tex files directly. Choose the file, and it is typeset right in your browser. You get a page-by-page preview, add the scan effect, and download a PDF that looks like it went through a real scanner. There is nothing to compile first (the step that normally turns a .tex file into a PDF), no TeX Live or MiKTeX to install, and no Overleaf account to sign in to.

It also works the other way round. If someone sends you a .tex file and you have never touched LaTeX, you can see what's in it without installing anything.

What comes through

The engine behind this isn't TeX. It understands the commands most documents use rather than all of LaTeX:

  • The title block, abstract and table of contents.
  • Sections and subsections with their numbering, and cross-references made with \ref and \eqref.
  • Bulleted, numbered and description lists, including nested ones.
  • Tables built with tabular and \hline, with captions and numbering.
  • Math, inline and displayed: equation, align, gather and multline. Formulas are set in a proper math font, so they look like LaTeX output rather than plain text with symbols dropped in.
  • Bibliographies written out with thebibliography and \bibitem, and the \cite calls that point at them.
  • Your own \newcommand macros, in text and inside math.
  • verbatim blocks and \verb for code.

An unsupported command doesn't break the document. Its name is shown highlighted where it stood, in the preview and in the scanned pages alike, so take it out of the source or replace it before you generate.

How to turn a .tex file into a scanned PDF

  1. Open LaTeX to Scanned PDF and select your .tex or .latex file.
  2. Go through the preview page by page. Check the headings, the equations and the tables.
  3. Adjust the scan effect. Keep blur and noise low if the document has small print or dense math.
  4. Generate the scanned PDF and download it.

If you'd rather have images, you can export each page as JPG or PNG instead. Our guide to PDF, JPG and PNG explains when each one makes sense. With Pro, Bulk Scan handles several .tex files at once.

Your source file is read and typeset inside your browser. It isn't uploaded to a server for compiling, and the document can't load anything from the internet while it is shown.

What to know before you start

This is a beta, and LaTeX is a big language. A few things won't match a PDF you compiled yourself:

  • Page breaks are different. Pages are laid out by the browser, not by TeX, so lines and pages break in different places, and a \newpage is ignored. Documents are set on A4 paper.
  • Packages are ignored. \usepackage lines are skipped, so a command that comes from a package shows up as an unknown command. The amsmath environments listed above still work, but equation numbers in align are dropped.
  • No TikZ, no BibTeX, no TeX primitives. Drawings made with TikZ or PGF aren't rendered. A bibliography kept in a .bib file isn't resolved; write the entries out with thebibliography instead. Low-level TeX such as \def isn't supported.
  • Figures from separate files are missing. A .tex file refers to images by their path on your disk, which the browser can't reach. The figure's caption and number still appear, but the picture itself doesn't.
  • The PDF is made of images. Like a real scan, the text can't be selected or searched. Keep the .tex source for editing.

If the layout has to match exactly, or your document leans on packages, compile it to PDF as you normally would, or on Overleaf if you have nothing installed, and then add the scan effect to that PDF in Look Scanned. That path handles any LaTeX document, because TeX has already done the hard part.

Got a .tex file that needs to look scanned? Try it now.