For AI-based PDF-to-LaTeX conversion, there is a Python package called Nougat. I always plan to play around with it in the coming week, but somehow this coming week never comes. If it is as good as it claims, we should brace ourselves for a wave of re-editions of classic texts.
EDIT: Installing it was surprisingly easy! Really just pip install nougat-ocr as said in the doc. But using it (on a WSL Ubuntu) is another story:
darij@skogen:/mnt/c/worksnap/temprepth/2$ nougat scan.pdf -o towber
WARNING:root:No GPU found. Conversion on CPU is very slow.
downloading nougat checkpoint version 0.1.0-small to path /home/darij/.cache/torch/hub/nougat-0.1.0-small
config.json: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 557/557 [00:00<00:00, 3.00Mb/s]
pytorch_model.bin: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 956M/956M [03:41<00:00, 4.53Mb/s]
special_tokens_map.json: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 96.0/96.0 [00:00<00:00, 770kb/s]
tokenizer.json: 100%|██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 2.04M/2.04M [00:00<00:00, 15.1Mb/s]
tokenizer_config.json: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 106/106 [00:00<00:00, 639kb/s]
/home/darij/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/torch/functional.py:504: UserWarning: torch.meshgrid: in an upcoming release, it will be required to pass the indexing argument. (Triggered internally at ../aten/src/ATen/native/TensorShape.cpp:3526.)
return _VF.meshgrid(tensors, **kwargs) # type: ignore[attr-defined]
0%| | 0/49 [00:00<?, ?it/s]INFO:root:Processing file scan.pdf with 49 pages
2%|█▋ | 1/49 [03:07<2:30:22, 187.96s/it]WARNING:root:Found repetitions in sample 0
[nltk_data] Downloading package words to /home/darij/nltk_data...
[nltk_data] Unzipping corpora/words.zip.
WARNING:root:Skipping page 2 due to repetitions.
6%|████▉ | 3/49 [08:15<2:03:54, 161.63s/it]WARNING:root:Found repetitions in sample 0
WARNING:root:Skipping page 4 due to repetitions.
8%|██████▌ | 4/49 [11:00<2:02:05, 162.78s/it]
I can live with the slowness (apparently Witcher 3 has no problems finding my GPU), but if it skips half the pages I'm not sure how much I can get out of it.