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

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81–90 of 138 posts

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

#81
post #45

This 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!

Yeah, 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. :)

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

#83

I 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 o…

This is fair. If somebody stumbles across this thinking it is how you intended it to be displayed, I can understand you'd be unhappy. We should make it clearer that we're just a conversion tool, not a source.

If you want us to remove your paper and just point at the PDF, we're happy to do so. My email's in my profile if you don't want to post the broken render here!

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

#85
post #82

Very 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.

I'm surprised there doesn't exist a more responsive/reactive PDF viewer. It seems like that would be easier than converting the document.

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

#86
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…

Two column papers are the worst format. They emphasize compact printability in a world where no one buys proceedings.

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

#88
post #85
post #82

Very 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.

I'm surprised there doesn't exist a more responsive/reactive PDF viewer. It seems like that would be easier than converting the document.

You mean like some embed like Scribd? I've never really liked that sort of stuff, always works wonky for me. Text is great.

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

#89
post #5

Nice! PDF is the worst format I can think of to present papers. Especially for reading on mobile this will be of great help.

I 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.

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

#90
post #56
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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?

Have you seen pandoc? That should be able to do that and the comments about results are usually positive. 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!

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