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Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
- zitterbewegung 9y agoThis is awesome ! Going on my home screen now. Love the design. Maybe you could ask Arxiv to have a button on their site that would direct it so that it opens on your site .
- bfirsh 9y agoWe were frustrated by the experience of reading machine learning papers on screens (particularly phones/tablets). There are lots of good tools for authoring HTML papers (Distill, Authorea, etc) but nothing that deals with the vast number of PDF papers that already exist. So, we built Arxiv Vanity: a site that renders Arxiv papers as web pages. It’s still pretty janky, but for the papers that do render correctly, the experience is so much better than reading a PDF. For example: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1705.04085v3/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1705.04085v3/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1708.00884/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1708.00884/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1705.06031v2/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1705.06031v2/ The source for the LaTeX to HTML renderer is on GitHub[0]. It’s built on Pandoc[1] and Distill.pub’s template[2]. [0] https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo [1] https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org [2] https://github.com/distillpub/template https://github.com/distillpub/template
- Drup 9y agoI was looking for a way to turn my (soon-to-be-defended) PhD thesis into an epub, and investigated the various LaTeX2Html converters. I was pretty disappointed when I realized that all of them are terrible and have no hope of handling my manuscript. My current solution is to create a rendering of my thesis in a5 format. :/ This look quite a bit better, so here is the question: what do you not support at the moment?
- bfirsh 9y agoA lot of things. LaTeX and its packages have so much surface area. Our approach so far is to just make the papers that we read readable. That probably covers the 20% of LaTeX features that 80% of people use. Here is the broken stuff we are keeping track of: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues (feel free to add to it!)
- zzleeper 9y agoIs there a reason for relying on pandocfilters instead of on Panflute [1]? I would think that panflute would allow for more readable code, which helps whendealing with all the corner cases and rough edges of latex. [1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/panflute https://github.com/sergiocorreia/panflute
- bfirsh 9y agoBecause we didn't know that existed! That looks so much better, thank you. The pandocfilters library is really hard to use. https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/160 https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/160
- KGIII 9y agoHave you seen pandoc? That should be able to do that and the comments about results are usually positive. https://pandoc.org/epub.html https://pandoc.org/epub.html One final thing, and wildly off topic, is that when you do your defense, remember that you probably know more about the specifics of the subject than anyone else in the room. Many folks stress over it, but you're almost certainly going to be the actual expert in the room. Good luck!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nextos 9y agoIt's very nice. You should expand to cover bioRxiv (biology) too.
- aroch 9y agobioRxiv doesn't expose LateX files, they explicitly only use PDFs to make things easier. Which means you're going to need to reflow PDFs (a la https://docushow.com/ https://docushow.com/), and I would guess there are a lot more edge cases there
- ldenoue 9y agoThanks for linking to https://docushow.com https://docushow.com Also a work in progress, but PDF reflow is a hard problem so you never ship if you want to solve all cases :) Your solution using the LaTex source generates really nice HTML, congrats!
- zellyn 9y agoLovely idea, and I can't wait until it gains super deep-learning smarts and gets everything perfect :-) For now, it's hard to read: https://docushow.com/viewdoc?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1710.07600v1.pdf https://docushow.com/viewdoc?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fp...
- leephillips 9y agoIn all three cases I find the original PDFs more pleasant to read. HTML typography is not up to snuff. I read them on a laptop, however, and I can see that this would be useful if one is forced to read on a phone. (One thing that is very ugly in the PDFs, and most scholarly papers, is the use of different-colored boxes for hyperlinks. Authors, please consider putting \usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref} in your LaTeX preambles.)
- Cyph0n 9y agoJust tried your suggestion: it ends up looking much uglier with font colors imo.
- leephillips 9y agoThe default saturated colors are a bit garish. But you can set them to be anything you want. See the hyperref documentation.
- sp332 9y agoFor me the PDF was fuzzier https://imgur.com/a/WJ5y3 https://imgur.com/a/WJ5y3 and the HTML version was more convenient to read in a single column. The two-column format is nice if I'm skimming to see if a paper is going to be interesting, but when I sit down to read it the HTML version definitely wins.
- JBorrow 9y agoOne of the things that I came across when writing my own janky pdf/latex->html converter for lecture notes[0] is that Pandoc doesn't handle references and subfigures correctly, even with pandoc-crossref and pandoc-citeproc enabled. I had to write a little python module[1] that used regex to extract those and then handle them on my own separately... This is definitely something you should look at. [0] https://dmaitre.phyip3.dur.ac.uk/NPP/notes/ https://dmaitre.phyip3.dur.ac.uk/NPP/notes/ [1] https://github.com/JBorrow/latex-pandoc-preprocessor https://github.com/JBorrow/latex-pandoc-preprocessor
- Eridrus 9y agoThis is cool, it would be nice to have a chrome extension to take me directly to this from the page/pdf.
- bfirsh 9y agoYes! This is a great idea, and something we have been thinking of. https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/arxiv-vanity/issues/67 https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/arxiv-vanity/issues/67
- isaykatsman 9y agoI actually made one quickly, published here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/arxiv-vanity-plugin/jfnlkegibnoaagfdabjkchhocdhnoofk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/arxiv-vanity-plugi... . It injects the arxiv vanity link on abstract pages and if you click the button when viewing an online arxiv pdf it opens the respective arxiv vanity link.
- KGIII 9y agoI'm not sure I understand. Well, I understand what you're doing but I'm not sure why you'd dislike PDF. PDF has the great benefit of rendering the same on every system. With very few exceptions, PDF will look exactly the same on every system and will print the same on every system. HTML doesn't really have that same benefit. Don't get me wrong, I think your service is a great idea for those who would like HTML formatted results, but I'm not understanding the complaint about PDF. Could you expand on why you don't like PDF?
- gnicholas 9y agoNot the OP, but PDF is bad on tablets and horrible on phones.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Cacti 9y agoWhat size tablets are people talking about? I find the iPad size practically ideal for consuming PDF papers.
- grzm 9y agoI think part of the issue is that PDF isn't responsive to the size of the device. A PDF is not much more than an image from the perspective of layout. I'd love to be able to reflow text from a PDF such that a single column fills my screen edge-to-edge and scrolling allows me to advance through the paper, as opposed to requiring me to reposition the viewport every time I reach the end of a column. I know this isn't the purpose of PDFs, and I love them in different contexts where layout (including typography) does matter to me. But I also really want to be able to easily consume papers in a way that isn't constrained by the PDF layout. Yes, I want my cake and a pony. Cakepony.
- KGIII 9y agoYup. I agree. I even find the experience fantastic on the original iPad, as well as a brand new one. I find it just fine on my phone, which isn't nearly as large a screen. I am guessing it is an individual taste thing. That makes some sense.
- Myrmornis 9y ago> particularly phones/tablets I understand the problem with a phone, but PDFs on an ipad/tablet are beautiful and a joy to read. Much better to read the text as originally typeset than to put it through a process such as this which risks corrupting minor but important details in the mathematical content. On my phone I put it in landscape mode and that allows me to read a PDF OK, but I don't really get why one would read academic papers on a phone, why not use a tablet? However I'm very interested in engrafo. It sounds like it will allow me to automatically publish blog style content from my LaTeX sources without having to fork the LaTeX content into a markdown / HTML version. I just don't understand why you don't like reading academic papers as PDFs on tablets!
- popcorncolonel 9y agoIt would be amazing if we could browse "Latest" by category, and for a certain day, much like: https://arxiv.org/list/math.NT/recent https://arxiv.org/list/math.NT/recent
- apepe 9y agoThat first article and how it looks when imported into Authorea in one click: https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/208068-automatic-extrinsic-calibration-for-lidar-stereo-vehicle-sensor-setups https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/208068-automatic-e... (just a couple of labels and si units which do not render). Note: it is forkable and can be commented upon.
- nodemaker 9y agoAwesome thank you so much :) The GAN paper somehow feels more readable :D
- captn3m0 9y agoThis is so much awesome. Thanks for building this.
- maxxxxx 9y agoNice! PDF is the worst format I can think of to present papers. Especially for reading on mobile this will be of great help.
- leephillips 9y agoPDF is the only format that will preserve the typographical details that are important in many technical papers; it also avoids the relatively bad rendering created by the browsers. PDF is usually bad, of course, on small screens, unless the publisher makes special versions.
- alexott 9y agoAnother useful thing is ability to put comments/annotations - I'm reading on iPad, and annotate quite a lot
- lvs 9y agoI think this is a dramatic difference of opinion between coders and everyone else in science, if you excuse the generalization. I say that because of the large number of tools to try to one-up the PDF for academic scholarship (e.g. Readcube). Publishers looking to invent ways to define their own value have been slowly trying to force these things onto readers, but almost everyone in my field hates them and wishes they would die. Formatting and typography are critical in many fields, and a PDF is the canonical way to maintain these aspects of a paper.
- ddinh 9y agoThis is an awesome tool. Thanks! Only issue I've run into so far is that cross-references to theorem numbers don't seem to always work correctly, e.g. you'll see a lot of "Theorem ?" in https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1607.06711/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1607.06711/.
- bfirsh 9y agoAh, looks like we don't support theorems. You can track it here: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/157 https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/157 Thanks!
- peatmoss 9y agoNot sure if all these are x-refs to theorems or not, but there seem to be lots of [?] links: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1602.08927/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1602.08927/ That said, on cursory look, this is pretty impressive. latex->web converters have existed for a long time, and this appears to have navigated some aspects quite well!
- sturmen 9y agoThis is awesome! I was literally rolling my eyes this morning about trying to read an arXiv paper on my phone.
- ldenoue 9y agoshameless plug: give https://docushow.com https://docushow.com a try!
- Cacti 9y agoGreat job! Personally, I prefer the PDF versions, but this could be very useful on a phone.
- mihaitodor 9y agoThat looks great! Well done!
- j2kun 9y agoLooks like it's failing to process some standard tex commands (e.g. \textup) as well as some user defined macros. See the many display errors in https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1710.07406/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1710.07406/ Of course, it goes without saying that I want this.
- stefco_ 9y agoThis is a superb idea! Still not working on some of the papers I read, but hopefully it will soon. I would love to see a bookmarklet that lets me hop from an arxiv page straight to Arxiv Vanity. Also, the manicure emoji for the favicon was a great choice!
- Kip9000 9y agoLooks great! Would be even better if the references are urls to other papers.
- whataretensors 9y agoVery cool idea! Thank you.
- auggierose 9y agoNot really my use case as I read PDF papers on an iPad Pro 12.9 inch, which is just fine, but very neat work! I tried it on this one: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1702.03277/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1702.03277/ Some commands don't work (\textsl, \rotatebox, ...) and the thank you footnote is incorporated into the title, but otherwise very readable!
- claudius 9y agoI have to admit I am not impressed. My first paper, which I tried to render, does not work properly; references are removed and rendered poorly, figures are misplaced and tables incomplete. Given that not all arXiv papers are under a permissive license and you do not have permission to do this, I would much prefer if you at least made sure that arxiv-vanity rendered papers do not show up in search results, e.g. by offering a suitable robots.txt and with a bigger link to the author-endorsed version of the paper. Edit to clarify: If people want to use or develop a broken sort-of-PDF viewer, that’s fine. However, if someone searches for a paper of mine, I would like them to only find the version where I at least had a chance to see that it renders correctly and is complete. In particular, I do not want to be "responsible" for broken rendering on random third-party websites. This website actually operating illegally does not make me more inclined to support it.
- badcede 9y agoI tried a bunch of papers that weren't yours and they came out really well.
- dosshell 9y agoI believe in most countries only a court can decide if a site is illegal or not. Not you. And as far as I know this is true in both France [0] and Germany[1]. IANAL. [0] I got the impression it was a French site [1] just guessing where you live
- claudius 9y agoEach arXiv paper has a well-defined license linked-to from the upper right hand corner "(license)" link below the PDF and source downloads. If they only re-hosted and re-compiled papers for which they have a license to do so, I wouldn’t complain at all, but re-hosting and modifying content without a valid license is clearly illegal, no?
- dragonwriter 9y ago> re-hosting and modifying content without a valid license is clearly illegal, no? No. Longer version: it's illegal only if a license is required, which is a matter of the copyright law of the jurisdiction relevant to the act. In the US, that question may turn on things like fair use analysis, which can be tricky.
- jknz 9y agoA big challenge is to get references working correctly. LaTeXML is quite good at converting latex documents to html [1], including references such as Theorem 2.1, equation (8.1) etc. For instance, the paper [2] appears to be quite readable on mobile, and clicking/tapping on a reference such as (8.1) leads you to equation (8.1) as you would expect. The auto-generation of Arxiv-Vanity is really nice, maybe it would be easy to add the LatexML output too? [1]: http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/demos/Html5/arXiv/lxmlexamples.html http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/demos/Html5/arXiv/lxmlexample... [2]: http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/demos/Html5/arXiv/LaTeXML/1108.5305.html#S8.E1 http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/demos/Html5/arXiv/LaTeXML/110...
- make3 9y agofuck that's cool
- huangc10 9y agoDefinitely useful in certain situations. Can't comment on how well the conversion works (yet) but I can see how this might be useful to a lot of people. Me? I still mostly prefer reading physical academic papers because of needing to flip back and forth for re-reading (clarification) and adding personal notes/graphs/calculations. Good job guys.
- marknadal 9y agoHallejuhah, we need to force academics and people who go around touting "whitepapers" to be ripped out of the proprietary PDF era of terrible UX/readability and into modern readable web documents. This is definitely the way to do it, this is brilliant!
- KGIII 9y agoFWIW, PDF is an open standard. There exist both open and proprietary readers and creators. It has been an open standard for nearly a decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format
- vimarshk 9y agoThis is so good. I do prefer the HTML over PDF in this scenario.
- mbillie1 9y agoI love this, thank you so much!
- michaelmior 9y agoLooks cool although the first paper I tried it on other than the examples didn't work :( Looking forward to seeing this improve!
- dbranes 9y agoUnfortunately it's failing on first things I tried with a not-so-helpful error message: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1608.04012/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1608.04012/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/0903.3065/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/0903.3065/ Also a lot of MathJax failures (maybe Latex variables names?) https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1709.09439/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1709.09439/
- bfirsh 9y agoThose problems are normally Pandoc parsing errors. Considering it's open source, perhaps we should print the error message so people can actually help fix it... The MathJax failures are either things that MathJax doesn't support, or use of \DeclareMathOperator which we haven't added support for yet. Edit: Added a more useful error message. :) https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1608.04012/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1608.04012/
- joshwcomeau 9y agoReally neat!! Thanks for sharing :)
- dang 9y agoThis is amazing. I hope you'll keep working on it. There's always a long tail of details that need taking care of when trying to cover a large corpus, and ploughing through successive 80%'s is (as you are no doubt acutely aware) serious grunt work. But you've made a fabulous start, so I hope you find the stamina to do it!
- bfirsh 9y agoYeah, even building upon Pandoc's LaTeX parsing, 3 months of grunt work got us this 20% working. Over the next 12 months we'll get the other 80% working. :)
- jxramos 9y agoNoob question but how far does Calibre take pdf to epub conversion? I've been really interested in learning more about the epub file format and was greatly intrigued to discover it extends xhtml and is essentially a zip folder if I've gathered that much correctly.
- doall 9y agoIt will be great if I can bookmark the position where I quit reading a paper.
- gnicholas 9y agoYou might add a contact link so people can easily get in touch. The first-listed personal homepage is kind of insane with all the flashing colors, and it contains dead links (e.g., your Twitter).
- bfirsh 9y agoYeah, that's a good point. Andreas's site is a bit out of date. I've made them link to more useful places. Thanks!
- fiatjaf 9y agoWhy PDFs in the first place? They're hard to write, hard to format, hard to generate, and they do no good at all to anyone. HTML is better read, smaller, faster, has more formatting options, and can have all contained in a single file. Seriously, stop creating PDFs.
- falkod 9y agoWhy the hate for PDFs, I can see why you would not want to communicate dynamic content with them, sure. But for academic papers, which are usually static text and equations and maybe some plots, PDFs do exactly what you want: At least in principle they look the same on every system. If I want to email them to somebody, store a copy, read them offline on a reader etc. I have to deal with one single file, in a format that just works on many readers. What am I gonna do when I typeset a paper with webtechnology ... fire up a local server to display some inline math in my html page .. no thank you. I agree that maybe layouting based on physical paper is maybe not ultimately necessary, but it gives the reader a familiar structure. The way the advertised web site is transferring the papers into a long scrolling list of text ... I find it rather disorienting and unstructured. Text that is split up into "pages" (whatever size they are in the end) somehow helps break up the reading flow. In the end it remains to be shown that the gain from having academic papers not typeset in PDF outweighs the hassle of having to deal with non-standardized ways of rendering properly formatted text on websites (thinks like MathJax etc. do not support everything that is available in full LaTeX etc.).
- fiatjaf 9y agoThank you for your response. I understand your points and will rethink my hate for PDFs. What I don't understand is why I got at least 2 downvotes. These days I'm getting downvotes for every opinion I express on HN. It's very annoying.
- wereHamster 9y agoYour question "Why PDFs in the first place?" was answered in bfirsh's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534583). But anyway, in the context of the discussion about this webpage/project, it's not relevant to ask why these PDFs exist. They do, and the scientific community is nowhere near a transition away from them. So bfirsh is trying to find a solution to consume those existing PDFs. So think as not getting downvoted for expressing your opinion, but more for not contributing to the discussion about this particular project.
- jwilk 9y agoWhy "Vanity"?
- bfirsh 9y agoA bit of wordplay on our favourite Arxiv tool. :) http://arxiv-sanity.com/ http://arxiv-sanity.com/
- jpeloquin 9y agoThis is really cool and has a lot of potential. Academic papers are dense and heavily cross-referenced, so experimenting with new display formats that do more to help the reader could make researchers a lot more productive. For example, citation tooltips are a big time saver compared to cross-referencing the bibliography. However, it's also beneficial for every paper to look the same because this makes skimming easier. To get both innovation and consistency is to develop tools, like Arxiv Vanity, that automatically transform the source document. This example makes me hopeful that we'll someday have similar tools for the commercial publishers' papers. As for immediate tweaks, I tentatively suggest making the text 100% black (like the original PDF) instead of rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8). The higher contrast will help those of us with less-than-great eyes.
- rundigen12 9y agoTried three papers: "Could not find Arxiv ID in that URL. Are you sure it's an arxiv.org URL?" Why, yes, I copied-and-pasted directly from the browser tab showing the Arxiv URL. Tried a couple other papers: "This paper failed to render. Take a look at the original PDF instead." So...with what probability does this actually work?
- bfirsh 9y agoWhat Arxiv URLs were you trying? LaTeX is really tricky to parse, which is why you're seeing those "failed to render" errors. Judging from our logs, it works about ~80% of the time. That's up a lot from plain Pandoc though - it could render hardly anything from Arxiv.
- rundigen12 9y agoI tried some more and still got the "are you sure this is a valid URL?" e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702106 https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702106 Tried https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06343 https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06343 and a couple others and got the "failed to render." Tried cloning engrafo, then installing docker, then building engrafo, then my disk was filling up and decided I'm done with this for now.
- fenwick67 9y agoSomebody please, PLEASE do this for Project Gutenburg.
- ocrcustomserver 9y agoI just visited Project Gutenberg and tried opening a few books. There seems to be a HTML option, what did you mean?
- fenwick67 9y agoThey are inconsistently formatted, and the default formatting usually takes up the whole page width, making it hard to actually read. I guess I could probably solve this with a custom stylesheet, though.
- pinouchon 9y agoSad to see that it doesn't render the figures properly for this paper: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1701.03757v1/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1701.03757v1/ I hope this can be made to work reliably. I generally prefer web pages to pdfs.
- bfirsh 9y agoLaTeX is hard, but we'll keep at it! That issue is being tracked here: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/12 https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/12
- tothrow2017 9y agoThis looks really cool. (The program had some issues with the bibliography and with custom layout, but other than that, was great.) It would be nice if an option to output MathML existed. (Why MathML? In brief, it allows treating Maths as a first-class citizen on the web. For instance, with MathML the reader can choose what font the equations will be rendered in — if you prefer STIX or Latin Modern Math, then you can specify it with CSS, and the browser will correctly render it. With the mash of spans within spans that arXiv-vanity uses, you couldn't change the font, as then the pre-calculated spacings would be wrong. (Alternatively, the publisher could easily offer several styles, without having to re-render everything, just by changing the CSS.) Arguably, client-side MathJax offers the same flexibility as MathML, but it's much, much slower, while rendering MathML in firefox is as fast as rendering standard, static HTML. Another application of MathML is embedding it in SVGs for beautiful graphs. MathML can also be pasted into other applications that support it, such as Thunderbird and Mathematica. )
- rublev 9y agoVery cool. Downloading PDF's has always bothered me and this is a fantastic and easy way to view papers, esp while commuting. A Native android or iOS tablet app would be neat to track your papers etc.
- pkrumins 9y agoI've a large collection of scientific papers and interesting publications all in PDF format, and I've never had a problem reading a PDF document.
- beezle 9y agoIt failed on all three papers I tried it on. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05313 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05313 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.06689 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.06689 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07508 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07508
- bfirsh 9y agoWe haven't implemented many of the LaTeX packages used in papers that aren't machine learning papers yet - sorry. :(
- billconan 9y agoThanks! This is useful. I always have trouble reading papers on Kindle, as the screen is small. panning and zooming are also painful as the device is slow. I kinda hope papers can be turned into single column (more kindle friendly.)
- nmca 9y agoSo I tried this on a couple of papers I need to read: awesome awesome awesome awesome. Would upvote a thousand times if I could. Awesome.
- thediff 9y agoPlease make the References section hyperlinked so clicking on a reference takes you to the paper.
- ocrcustomserver 9y agoReally like this! I'm working on something similar, a generic PDF to HTML converter that enables reflowing of documents on a mobile device. Any recommendations for HTML templates other than the distill.pub one?
- gumby 9y agoThank you thank you thank you! I detest the reader-hostile PDF (and WTF? why would you write something and then make it inconvenient to read???) Unfortunately, among its sins, PDF discards a lot of the presentation semantics (headers, footnotes etc). Congrats on doing a credible job trying to reconstruct some of that! It's a tough, thankless job. I was horrified when Adobe introduced PDF and indeed it has turned out at least as badly as I had feared.
- Analog24 9y agoI believe it's reconstructed from the Latex source, which is how every paper is submitted to the ArXiv. Not to diminish this site but I'm guessing that generating HTML from Latex is a lot easier than doing it from PDF format.
- gumby 9y agoThanks. Soon I suppose we'll be able to run a LaTeX->TeX rendering system compiled to web assembly!
- impendia 9y agoI am curious, would you mind explaining why you dislike PDF? (I'm an academic and I'm used to PDFs and I like them myself.)
- cyberpunk0 9y agoThis site is nice even for mobile! Shameless plug: I made an Android app for arXiv if anyone wants something simple to search articles on mobile. Graduating soon so if you try and enjoy it, any positive (but honest) views help the looming job search ;) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.imaginatrix.synapse https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.imaginatri...
- ReverseCold 9y agoAlso this one: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.commonsware.android.arXiv/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.commonsware.android.arXiv/
- strin 9y agoGreat work. I've also been working on a similar open-source project "Sharead". https://github.com/strin/sharead https://github.com/strin/sharead It has a chrome extension that uploads Arxiv papers, and you can manage papers with tags. It also automatically converts pdf to HTML using a library called pdf2html: https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX
- visarga 9y agoFor bitmap based PDFs it would be possible to segment the document into words and images (just bounding boxes, not OCR), then "reflow" them to a different page size, by allocating less words per row. Does anyone know if this kind of PDF reader exists? Such a PDF reflow reader would work on scanned old books.
- ocrcustomserver 9y agoI'm working on it, email me for early access.
- deipoda 9y agoGreat tool for mobile! Have to say I'm too used to PDFs on my laptop, although I can see this replacing it. Two suggestions- 1. Center the text to the screen 2. Justify the text (I'm not sure how difficult these are though)
- HaoZeke 9y agoAn excellent project, though maybe Sakura CSS would be a lighter alternative to distill...
- poloolop 9y agoI know a lot of coworkers who prefer to print the paper they want to read. Hope better readability options on digital platforms reduces the urge to print everything.
- netheril96 9y agoNow, if this can be integrated with arXiv-sanity.com
- alkonaut 9y agoThis will save so many trees.
- mastazi 9y agoWhen the render fails, why are you redirecting to the pdf file intead of redirecting to the abstract? E.g. here (link stolen from another comment in this page) https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1608.04012/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1608.04012/
- visarga 9y agoNarrow column would be easier. Full screen width is not best practice.
- rahimnathwani 9y agoIf you're on Android or an ereader and frequently read two-column PDFs, consider using Koreader: https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader
- arkades 9y agoI would pay at least 10$ for an app that made an aesthetically-pleasing HTML flow of any pdf document I’m looking at. At least. And I can’t imagine I’d be the only one. So much of my reading is on-screen now, and PDFs do kind of suck for two column reading.
- ocrcustomserver 9y agoWhat kind of pricing schema would you prefer for this? Monthly or one time payment?
- arkades 9y agoIt definitely feels like a one time payment, since my mental model for it would be “pdf reader.” Also, since I’m accustomed to SaaS in my business dealings, but detest it in the private consumer space, and this would appeal to me as a consumer; my business documents are already mostly PowerPoints, with the occasional word doc.