101–110 of 138 posts
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.
We 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…
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!
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.imaginatri...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HTML doesn't really have that same benefit. Yes, it does.
Not really, look at the myriad rendering issues between the most popular browsers. PDF should result in pixel-for-pixel reproducibility, browsers don't do that in practice. That's why we still test pages in different browsers and end up using browser specific code to ensure proper rendering - which often only reaches the 'close enough' format.
Thank 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…
This 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.imaginatri...
Somebody please, PLEASE do this for Project Gutenburg.
I just visited Project Gutenberg and tried opening a few books. There seems to be a HTML option, what did you mean?
I guess I could probably solve this with a custom stylesheet, though.
We 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…
I've also been working on a similar open-source project "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:
Does anyone know if this kind of PDF reader exists? Such a PDF reflow reader would work on scanned old books.