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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

#21
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.

PDF is the only format that will preserve the typographical details that are important in many technical papers; it also avoids the relatively bad rendering created by the browsers.

PDF is usually bad, of course, on small screens, unless the publisher makes special versions.

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

#22
post #12
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?

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!)

Is there a reason for relying on pandocfilters instead of on Panflute [1]?

I would think that panflute would allow for more readable code, which helps whendealing with all the corner cases and rough edges of latex.

[1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/panflute

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

#23
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…

One of the things that I came across when writing my own janky pdf/latex->html converter for lecture notes[0] is that Pandoc doesn't handle references and subfigures correctly, even with pandoc-crossref and pandoc-citeproc enabled. I had to write a little python module[1] that used regex to extract those and then handle them on my own separately... This is definitely something you should look at.

[0] https://dmaitre.phyip3.dur.ac.uk/NPP/notes/ [1] https://github.com/JBorrow/latex-pandoc-preprocessor

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

#25
Not really my use case as I read PDF papers on an iPad Pro 12.9 inch, which is just fine, but very neat work!

I tried it on this one: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1702.03277/

Some commands don't work (\textsl, \rotatebox, ...) and the thank you footnote is incorporated into the title, but otherwise very readable!

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

#26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

Is there a reason for relying on pandocfilters instead of on Panflute [1]? I would think that panflute would allow for more readable code, which helps whendealing with all the corner cases and rough edges of latex. [1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/panflute

Because we didn't know that existed! That looks so much better, thank you. The pandocfilters library is really hard to use.

https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/160

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

#27
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 offering a suitable robots.txt and with a bigger link to the author-endorsed version of the paper.

Edit to clarify: If people want to use or develop a broken sort-of-PDF viewer, that’s fine. However, if someone searches for a paper of mine, I would like them to only find the version where I at least had a chance to see that it renders correctly and is complete. In particular, I do not want to be "responsible" for broken rendering on random third-party websites. This website actually operating illegally does not make me more inclined to support it.

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

#28
A big challenge is to get references working correctly. LaTeXML is quite good at converting latex documents to html [1], including references such as Theorem 2.1, equation (8.1) etc.

For instance, the paper [2] appears to be quite readable on mobile, and clicking/tapping on a reference such as (8.1) leads you to equation (8.1) as you would expect.

The auto-generation of Arxiv-Vanity is really nice, maybe it would be easy to add the LatexML output too?

[1]: http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/demos/Html5/arXiv/lxmlexample...

[2]: http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/demos/Html5/arXiv/LaTeXML/110...

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

#29
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…

This is cool, it would be nice to have a chrome extension to take me directly to this from the page/pdf.
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