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Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

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Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#71

Post by KGIII »

JosephRedfern wrote: post #64
KGIII wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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 format…

IMO, Reading two-column papers on an iPhone (through PDF) is a real pain -- IMO the format relies on you using your eyes to jump from bottom left to top right, rather than having to scroll from the very bottom to the very top (diagonally). Same problem even exists for single-column styles -- you need to zoom in so much that you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically. The need to scroll doesn't exist on a l…

I wonder if that's a personal thing? Over the past year, I've been trying to join the mobile revolution - sort of. The majority of my browsing is now done on a tablet.

I read quite a few PDFs and don't actually have any complaints. I am not personally seeing any readability issues and don't mind consuming PDFs at all.

That said, I think I now understand your complaint. Thanks! I just don't personally have any trouble with it. I use multiple tablets, of varied sizes, and I've had good experiences with all of the devices. While some PDFs are horribly formatted, I find that the device choice doesn't help that and it's a design choice from the author.

But, again, thanks for helping me understand.

Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#72

Post by KGIII »

Cacti wrote: post #61
gnicholas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but PDF is bad on tablets and horrible on phones.

What size tablets are people talking about? I find the iPad size practically ideal for consuming PDF papers.

Yup. 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.

Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#73

Post by gnicholas »

Cacti wrote: post #61
gnicholas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but PDF is bad on tablets and horrible on phones.

What size tablets are people talking about? I find the iPad size practically ideal for consuming PDF papers.

Yeah fair point, I use an iPad mini. But I have heard similar complaints from older folks (40+) who have full-size iPads. I think much of it stems from dual-column printing, which is just kind of antiquated/annoying on digital.

Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#74

Post by rundigen12 »

Tried 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?

Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#75

Post by bfirsh »

rundigen12 wrote: post #74

Tried 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?

What 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.

Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#76

Post by rundigen12 »

bfirsh wrote: post #75
rundigen12 wrote: post #74

Tried 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?

What 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.

I tried some more and still got the "are you sure this is a valid URL?" e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702106

Tried 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.

Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#79

Post by tothrow2017 »

This 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. )

Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages

#80

Post by bfirsh »

pinouchon wrote: post #78

Sad to see that it doesn't render the figures properly for this paper: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1701.03757v1/ I hope this can be made to work reliably. I generally prefer web pages to pdfs.

LaTeX is hard, but we'll keep at it! That issue is being tracked here: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/12
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