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Tell HN: Replace the X with a 5 in arXiv.org to display a paper in HTML
Check it out: https://ar5iv.org/pdf/2106.10522.pdf
- unmole 5y agoAm I a weirdo for preferring PDF to read papers?
- resoluteteeth 5y agoNice. It looks like a site with a similar idea was posted to hn before[1], but the result from ar5iv seems to be a bit slicker/cleaner than that site. 1: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/
- jessriedel 5y agoUnfortunatley, ar5iv also only hosts the first version of the paper, while arxiv-vanity only hosts the last.
- dginev 5y agoWhich is intentional. ar5iv does not aim to be a live preview service, or replace arXiv. The primary aim is to serve the community with the outputs we have, while we improve the coverage and fidelity of our generator. And yes, using only the official sources arXiv has released for reuse: https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3 https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3 This is indeed a major difference with -vanity
- sundarurfriend 5y ago> The primary aim is to serve the community with the outputs we have, while we improve the coverage and fidelity of our generator. Could you explain what you mean here? Who is "we" - I assume ar5iv? "while we improve the coverage and fidelity of our generator" <-- does this mean this is a temporary situation, and in the future multiple versions of the paper will be available?
- dginev 5y agoCertainly, sorry for the confusion. There's actually multiple "we", since there are two institutions involved, and one foil character - I'm the only one responsible for ar5iv "the website", in a personal capacity. The fidelity of the generator has the "we" of the team behind LaTeXML, the TeX-to-HTML conversion tool. That is in many ways the most important project to remember here, as that is what we want to actively improve to a point where it is "good enough" in creating HTML over the entirety of arXiv. The institution hosting the website, and wanting to "serve a community" is KWARC, a research group at the university of FAU-Erlangen in Germany. There are all kinds of projects and services brewing on that end, which have interplay with the HTML data behind ar5iv, but are not directly on the site. And as to all of us reading HN, I think we are actually interested in arXiv itself being maximally useful. And so is the ar5iv site - it's a temporary deployment, that really is aiming to reintegrate back into the arxiv.org site, and general infrastructure. If/when that happens is unclear, but in the meantime there is a lot of improvements that can be made, both in what HTML can be generated, deciding what the markup of scientific documents ought to be in the first place, as well as gaining some insights for what new problems arXiv would encounter if they served HTML.
- dginev 5y agoOh, and the last question - yes, if arXiv integrates the feature, they will be able to serve any of the versions, including the most recent one. I can technically implement that, but I really don't want to, as I see it as crossing a certain line. Seeing ar5iv as a limited, constrained, service is a good thing - I think it clearly communicates that I do not want to compete with arXiv.
- visarga 5y agoUnlike Ar5iv, Arxiv-vanity will also show papers more recent than a month, which are usually the papers you want to open.
- peterzjx 5y agoFor the most recent papers on arxiv, you can check out another site here https://academ.us/article/2106.10522/ https://academ.us/article/2106.10522/ This one uses a different backend (pandoc), so slightly different pros and cons in rendering.
- 3pt14159 5y agoThank you! This is amazing! My only ask is that you bump up the default font size.
- kzrdude 5y agoI was going to suggest bump up the saturation/blackness of the font so that it's easier to read.
- Symbiote 5y agoDon't most browsers remember your zoom when you revisit a website?
- eatonphil 5y agoMaybe it's a mobile issue? I've never adjusted zoom in my phone.
- 3pt14159 5y agoYes, but why have such an hard to read default?
- Kelamir 5y agoI'm not sure but it could be that it makes it easier to read on big displays. Of course this isn't very Responsive Design like. I will be glad to be proven wrong. Interested in why HN has such a small font by default as well.
- sandhiw 5y agoAwesome, easy way to read papers in the browser with dark mode without inverting image colors (like what Dark Reader does)
- fullam 5y agoNeed this for bioarxiv also!
- michaelhoffman 5y agobioRxiv converts PDFs to full-text already. They're right there on the bioRxiv web site—just click the "Full text" tab. For example, our most recent bioRxiv preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.07.475366v1.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.07.475366v1.... If you want to do URL munging instead of using the UI, just add `.full` to the end of the URL ;) This doesn't require that the manuscript be submitted in any particular format either. There are humans involved in making sure the full text formatting from PDF is good.
- chubot 5y agoVery nice idea, although the first PDF I tried wasn't available, and the second one seems to be missing a lot: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.00888.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.00888.pdf (19 pages) https://ar5iv.org/html/2001.00888 https://ar5iv.org/html/2001.00888 (missing content) This is no doubt a hard problem ...
- tech-no-logical 5y agoseems it craps out on the monospaced bits of text ?
- dginev 5y agoIf you have a spare minute, please pay a visit to the "report issue" button at the bottom. Indeed - hard problem and a messy solution. I have no easy answers.
- gspr 5y agoThat's a lot less bad than I expected!
- dginev 5y agoThanks!
- scythmic_waves 5y agoThis is great! The hoverable footnotes are a nice touch.
- tingletech 5y agoarXiv have the advantage that they have LaTeX source for a majority of their submissions. Much easier to convert that to HTML that any arbitrary PDF.
- evanb 5y agoFor any arXiv submission that was submitted via LaTeX, you can download the source.
- jessriedel 5y agoThis was a very far-sighted move by, I believe, Paul Ginsparg back in the early days. It significantly increases the headache of submitting to the arXiv because you have to get your tex file to compile with the tex distribution on their servers rather than just on your own home box. But it makes the arxiv vastly more future proof than it would be if you could just upload PDFs.
- tingletech 5y agoI think arXiv / LANL preprint service predate PDF and the web (ftp and gopher). tex is seems more popular still in physics than other disciplines.
- jessriedel 5y agoYes, the arXiv started with PDF-less tex. (I believe people just compiled to postscripts files, which could be printed directly.) But when PDFs appeared, and especially as latex distributions became less standardized, there would have been a natural pressure to accept PDFs.
- tingletech 5y agoyes, this is why they have accepted PDF for some time https://arxiv.org/help/submit_pdf https://arxiv.org/help/submit_pdf (maybe for as long as since 2004 -- but ironically archive.org could not access arXiv for some years https://web.archive.org/web/20041101000000*/https://arxiv.org/help/submit_pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20041101000000*/https://arxiv.or... ) Most other preprint services, such as those based on eprints (and in other disciplines) have always accepted PDF.
- hyperhopper 5y agoMy biggest complaint with all these super useful sites is that I can never remember them when I need them. Replace this in YouTube to bypass country restrictions, replace that in arxiv to view in browser, etc. I wish somebody could make an extension or repository system to store all these, and prompt you sometimes when on the sites.
- curiousllama 5y agoI agree, I can't wait to forget about what the name of the repository is
- EGreg 5y agoI can’t wait to turn down at least $6B offer for my company :)
- sundarurfriend 5y agoAh, this comment prompted me to add this to my Anki, so thanks! I got frustrated never remembering https://remove-js.com https://remove-js.com , so added it to a deck on Anki and now I'm unlikely to ever forget it. This is useful enough to go on the deck too.
- siva7 5y agoI‘m using Anki to not forget my fitness workouts
- kazinator 5y agoAnki is great for remembering your fitness workouts, if you plan to sabotage your fitness with increasing intervals between workouts. :)
- Kelamir 5y agoHihi. That's true. Maybe an addon that keeps cards' ease at the same rate would do. By the way, have you checked out Migaku's vacation add-on? I suggested it to you a while ago.
- steelstraw 5y agoThanks! What other sites have these kind of URL hacks?
- slig 5y agoYoutube has the type "nsfw" before any youtube.com address to bypass the age-restriction.
- galori 5y agoreplace reddit.com with redditp.com to make it into a slide show of the images in the sub example: https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/ --> https://www.redditp.com/r/gifs/ https://www.redditp.com/r/gifs/ (there are a few other similar reddit --> image gallery url hacks, just google for them)
- hk1337 5y agoThis must be a Dartmouth project.
- swframe2 5y agoPlease consider adding a little bit of javascript to find and display the text that describes the variable in a formula when the mouse hovers over it. Even better would be to allow signed-in users (or paid subscribers) to add annotations (and links to youtube videos). I would prefer if your site requires a paid subscription so you can incentivize people to annotate the content. For a paper author, making the paper terse and complex is more impressive but for the rest of us it is very tedious to decipher.
- peterzjx 5y agoYou can check out a similar site here, for example https://academ.us/article/2202.04668/ https://academ.us/article/2202.04668/ If you click on the cross reference of figures and equations it will pop up a sticker showing the corresponding content, if that's what you mean.
- baby 5y agoDo this with eprint please!
- max_ 5y agoThe entire project is open source[0]. [0]: https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv
- max_ 5y agoThe project is open source, so this can easily be ported to any site[0]. [0]: https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv
- aasasd 5y agoPeople put in effort making PDFs and ensuring that nobody can read them without either a 14" portrait screen or a ton of scrolling—and you had to come along and ruin that carefully laid out inconvenience? What's wrong with you. The incredibly complex layout of ‘a wall of text and occasional pictures’ is there for a reason. That's what the authors wanted, and only PDF is up to the task of representing such delicate formatting.
- shishy 5y agoNot sure if this is sarcasm... but I don't think OP made this (https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv), they are just sharing. Besides I don't think this is meant to be a total replacement that everyone is going to magically use and abandon PDFs, it might just be a convenience within a workflow to skim and check the full PDF if necessary.
- ouid 5y agoI think the holes on your sarcasm filter might be too large.
- jimhefferon 5y agoI used to think I could recognize sarcasm whenever I saw it. Then I lived through the past few years.
- ouid 5y agoI'm not making detailed arguments about what your sarcasm filter should be, but if this comment isn't detected as sarcasm, you should turn a knob somewhere.
- jimhefferon 5y agoI have to calibrate it to the fact that during the 2016 presidential debates one of the major party candidates assured everyone watching that his sex organs were doing great. And he won. My knobs are on 11, frankly.
- dark-star 5y agoI checked the example link, and it has trouble rendering utf-8 or something (search for the Feynman quote about "nature", it starts with "Nature isnât classical...", or the poem at the end) I wonder how well it works with more complicated mathematical formulas containing greek or arabic letters (although the example in that paper look fine to me), or other non-ASCII scripts. other than that, this looks pretty amazing
- fxtentacle 5y agoHow does this compare to arxiv-vanity.org?
- dginev 5y agoSame HTML backend generator (latexml), different frontends, and different coverage of arXiv. Also, ar5iv may disappear very quickly, since I am unsure if it's more helpful or harmful. But I'll definitely lean on the public attention to keep asking arXiv to integrate an HTML preview for their articles. In the one-and-only arxiv.org itself. Lastly, one difference that may ignite a curious debate is that ar5iv is committed to being MathML-native. Yes. MathML is the only markup used for math syntax, and you'll see it rendered directly, undisturbed, with Firefox today. Over 500 million MathML elements in the full dataset too, pretty awe-inspiring.
- aasasd 5y agoBy the way: if you can, it would probably be wise to drop justified alignment, and make text aligned to the left. Rectangle blocks of text only look good from a distance—when actually trying to read, the differing inter-word spaces just make the experience jarring. It's especially bad on phones, which is a prime use-case for the HTML conversion. (Though, from ‘tell HN’, the poster is probably not the site author, right?)
- dginev 5y agoHN can obviously summon the site author (hi!) What I was wondering - and still am - shouldn't it be possible to get to a "Pleasant" justified layout on the web in general? The jagged left-aligned paragraphs are some of the first bits people point to when invoking "my PDF looks better". I definitely am not saying I did it perfectly, but shouldn't it be possible to get a good justified scientific article on the web? Why not?
- aasasd 5y agoHi. “Looks better” only works in regard to justification when one is admiring a page overall. However, that's not how people actually read text. They look at words in lines, and at that time uneven spacing keeps tripping the eye up. I know this argument, but there's no way around this discussion, and that's all there is to say about it (so far). Nicely looking bricks of paragraphs won't make the eye glide smoothly over the holes. Page layout programs spend some CPU time on fiddling the hyphenation until the spacing is even. Browsers can't afford to do that, afaik (not sure about currently, but that was the situation a while back). Moreover, from what I vaguely heard, the HTML specification defines paragraphs in such a way that browsers don't even have the freedom to fiddle the paragraph height—something about the height being the minimum for the text on hand, or something like that. Even if you insist to keep justification on desktop (though I personally can see the holes clearly)—for the love of good, please disable it on phones. It's just a mess there.
- dginev 5y agoGot it. So even with hyphenation, the gaps are still bad enough that you'd consider the current ar5iv rendering bumpy and distracting? I think I can see that, but it's almost there, which is why it feels like there has to be something I'm missing for it to justify "just right". But yes, at the least you've convinced me we should have a separate theme that goes left-aligned, and possibly makes a number of other choices that maximize readability. Since I'd still want the folks that want "as good as PDF", to feel justified for sticking around.
- brummm 5y agoThe Latex created PDF's are 100 times more pleasant to read though.
- phailhaus 5y agoProblem is, the Latex created PDF's have fixed width and read horribly on smaller screens as a result, with no option of a dark mode. Often on mobile you'll be forced to download the PDF as well.
- jvanderbot 5y agoBefore you get too excited: "We are usually at least a month behind the live arXiv article list. Also, we can only serve papers submitted with their LaTeX sources." Moderate excitement is probably warranted, though.
- dynm 5y agoIf a paper is prepared in latex, arxiv will detect that and insist that the sources are included. (They compile the pdf themselves.) So I think the second point shouldn't be much of a problem in fields where everyone uses latex.
- burtonator 5y agoAnyone know what % of papers are submitted with their LaTeX sources?
- jppope 5y agothats RAD. awesome work
- beanjuiceII 5y agowow thank you for this!
- scaredginger 5y agoExcellent, whenever I stumble across a proof that P=NP, I think it would be better in HTML
- DLA 5y agoThis is BEAUTIFUL work!