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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

#91

Post by falkod »

fiatjaf wrote: post #59

Why 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.

Why 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.).

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

#93

Post by bfirsh »

beezle wrote: post #87

It failed on all three papers I tried it on. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05313 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.06689 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07508

We haven't implemented many of the LaTeX packages used in papers that aren't machine learning papers yet - sorry. :(

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

#94

Post by billconan »

Thanks! 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.)

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

#97

Post by bfirsh »

thediff wrote: post #96

Please make the References section hyperlinked so clicking on a reference takes you to the paper.

So much this. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to build this.

https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/127

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

#98

Post by sfifs »

KGIII wrote: post #52
bfirsh wrote: post #2

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'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…

I consume almost all my media on phone. The problem with pdf is precisely that it renders the same on every screen - this makes most PDFs virtually unusable on the phone as you have to scroll down one column in a page, then up for the second column etc.

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

#99

Post by patcon »

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.

Fwiw, this conversation greatly varies depending on who is doing the reading -- the rather banal fact is that the average 25-year-old student has much different ability to screen-read than the average 60-year-old professor (or a 60-year-old student, for that matter) :)

so no need to search tablet specs for the culprit. PEBCAK :)

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