If you're on Android or an ereader and frequently read two-column PDFs, consider using Koreader: https://github.com/koreader/koreader
Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
131–138 of 138 posts
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#132For bitmap based PDFs it would be possible to segment the document into words and images (just bounding boxes, not OCR), then "reflow" them to a different page size, by allocating less words per row. Does anyone know if this kind of PDF reader exists? Such a PDF reflow reader would work on scanned old books.
I'm working on it, email me for early access.
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#133I would pay at least 10$ for an app that made an aesthetically-pleasing HTML flow of any pdf document I’m looking at. At least. And I can’t imagine I’d be the only one. So much of my reading is on-screen now, and PDFs do kind of suck for two column reading.
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#134We 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…
That first article and how it looks when imported into Authorea in one click: https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/208068-automatic-e... (just a couple of labels and si units which do not render). Note: it is forkable and can be commented upon.
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#135I would pay at least 10$ for an app that made an aesthetically-pleasing HTML flow of any pdf document I’m looking at. At least. And I can’t imagine I’d be the only one. So much of my reading is on-screen now, and PDFs do kind of suck for two column reading.
What kind of pricing schema would you prefer for this?
Monthly or one time payment?
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#136I would pay at least 10$ for an app that made an aesthetically-pleasing HTML flow of any pdf document I’m looking at. At least. And I can’t imagine I’d be the only one. So much of my reading is on-screen now, and PDFs do kind of suck for two column reading.
What kind of pricing schema would you prefer for this? Monthly or one time payment?
It definitely feels like a one time payment, since my mental model for it would be “pdf reader.” Also, since I’m accustomed to SaaS in my business dealings, but detest it in the private consumer space, and this would appeal to me as a consumer; my business documents are already mostly PowerPoints, with the occasional word doc.
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#137We 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.
I actually made one quickly, published here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/arxiv-vanity-plugi... . It injects the arxiv vanity link on abstract pages and if you click the button when viewing an online arxiv pdf it opens the respective arxiv vanity link.
Re: Show HN: Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages
#138Thank you thank you thank you! I detest the reader-hostile PDF (and WTF? why would you write something and then make it inconvenient to read???) Unfortunately, among its sins, PDF discards a lot of the presentation semantics (headers, footnotes etc). Congrats on doing a credible job trying to reconstruct some of that! It's a tough, thankless job. I was horrified when Adobe introduced PDF and indeed it has turned out…
I am curious, would you mind explaining why you dislike PDF?
(I'm an academic and I'm used to PDFs and I like them myself.)