Great job!
Personally, I prefer the PDF versions, but this could be very useful on a phone.
Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
11–20 of 138 posts
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#12We 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 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?
A lot of things. LaTeX and its packages have so much surface area. Our approach so far is to just make the papers that we read readable. That probably covers the 20% of LaTeX features that 80% of people use.
Here is the broken stuff we are keeping track of: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues (feel free to add to it!)
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#13This is an awesome tool. Thanks! Only issue I've run into so far is that cross-references to theorem numbers don't seem to always work correctly, e.g. you'll see a lot of "Theorem ?" in https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1607.06711/ .
Not sure if all these are x-refs to theorems or not, but there seem to be lots of [?] links: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1602.08927/
That said, on cursory look, this is pretty impressive. latex->web converters have existed for a long time, and this appears to have navigated some aspects quite well!
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#14That looks great! Well done!
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#15We 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…
It's very nice. You should expand to cover bioRxiv (biology) too.
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#16We 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…
It's very nice. You should expand to cover bioRxiv (biology) too.
bioRxiv doesn't expose LateX files, they explicitly only use PDFs to make things easier. Which means you're going to need to reflow PDFs (a la https://docushow.com/), and I would guess there are a lot more edge cases there
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#17We 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…
In all three cases I find the original PDFs more pleasant to read. HTML typography is not up to snuff. I read them on a laptop, however, and I can see that this would be useful if one is forced to read on a phone.
(One thing that is very ugly in the PDFs, and most scholarly papers, is the use of different-colored boxes for hyperlinks. Authors, please consider putting
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
in your LaTeX preambles.)
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#18Looks like it's failing to process some standard tex commands (e.g. \textup) as well as some user defined macros. See the many display errors in https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1710.07406/
Of course, it goes without saying that I want this.
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#19This is a superb idea! Still not working on some of the papers I read, but hopefully it will soon.
I would love to see a bookmarklet that lets me hop from an arxiv page straight to Arxiv Vanity.
Also, the manicure emoji for the favicon was a great choice!
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#20Looks great!
Would be even better if the references are urls to other papers.