Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

blog.arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 325 posts

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#11

Post by Strilanc »

alephnerd wrote: post #3

This is a great UX addition. Why did it take them so long?

How would you do it quickly?

For example, HTML isn't divided into numbereres pages while PDFs are. A lot of latex interacts with page boundaries. Figures tend towards the tops of pages. And there's \clearpage. And the reference list might say which page each citation appeared on. All that stuff needs someone to decide how to handle it and then to implement that handling. Like... what value does \pageheight return? Sometimes I resize things to fit the page height, and if it was doubled then I should have resized to fit the width instead.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#13

Post by r3trohack3r »

shusaku wrote: post #8

Seems like the references aren’t working very well. I really want journals to have two way links in a paper. I get google scholar alerts about certain papers being cited, and I want to skip to “why did they cite this? Did they use it, improve it, it just mention it?”

I’d never considered setting up citation alerts like this.

Thank you for the idea!

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#17

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

gwern wrote: post #6
alephnerd wrote: post #3

This is a great UX addition. Why did it take them so long?

The conversion is still very error-prone. It can't convert a lot of packages, and the last paper I read, StarVector, half the HTML version is just missing. (I think it hit an error at a figure of some sort.) I reported an error, but I've been reporting errors against the ar5iv and abstracts for years now and the long tail of problems just seems like an incredible slog.

Where are the computer vision people? This is the perfect type of problem for multi modal LLMs

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#18

Post by lynndotpy »

alephnerd wrote: post #3

This is a great UX addition. Why did it take them so long?

Almost universally, we prepare conference papers as LaTeX files made to export to PDFs which fit within the conferences template.

It's nontrivial to export this to HTML in all cases, and even then, nobody is asking for HTML from us even though we all want it. I'm guessing Arxiv is using some kind of converter which _usually_ but not _always_ works.

That said, this is a long time coming and PDF as the standard should've died a decade ago. I wish I had this when I was in my PhD program.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#20

Post by shrimpx »

shusaku wrote: post #8

Seems like the references aren’t working very well. I really want journals to have two way links in a paper. I get google scholar alerts about certain papers being cited, and I want to skip to “why did they cite this? Did they use it, improve it, it just mention it?”

Looks like clicking a reference adds the hash to the URL but doesn't scroll to the reference. If you load the hash URL directly in the browser you get a 404 page...
Post reply on HN