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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

blog.arxiv.org

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Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#41

Post by matt1 »

For anyone interested in staying informed about important new AI/ML papers on arXiv, check out https://www.emergentmind.com, a site I'm building that should help.

Emergent Mind works by checking social media for arXiv paper mentions (HackerNews, Reddit, X, YouTube, and GitHub), then ranks the papers based on how much social media activity there has been and how long since the paper was published (similar to how HN and Reddit work, except using social media activity, not upvotes, for the ranking). Then, for each paper, it summarizes it using GPT-4, links to the social media discussions, paper references, and related papers.

It's a fairly new site and I haven't shared it much yet. Would love any feedback or requests you all have for improving it.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#44

Post by [deleted] »

FredPret wrote: post #28
burkaman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the PDF of the same paper for comparison: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.12451.pdf

The contrast is massive. I'm much more likely to read the html version; that PDF is deeply off-putting in some hard to define way. Maybe it's the two columns, or the font, or the fact that the format doesn't adjust to fit different screen sizes.

[deleted]

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#46

Post by miki123211 »

tarboreus wrote: post #39

One of the reasons is to make the papers more accessible to people with disabilities, especially the blind. I participated in a conference they hosted on this a few months ago, I recommend taking a look at the recordings if you're interested in thinking on this. https://accessibility2023.arxiv.org/

Blind person here, can confirm this. Reading PDFs with a screen reader is bad, reading PDFs that come from LaTeX is worse, reading LaTeX math is pretty much impossible. All the semantic info you need is just thrown away.

You can make decently accessible PDFs but it's lots of work, you need Acrobat on the producer' side and might also need it on the consumer's side. Free tools don't even come close. There's also the fact that the process of making accessible PDFs in Acrobat isn't itself accessible.

With that said, the way screen readers treat HTML math certainly isn't perfect, it's geared more towards school children than anything above calculus. I'm probably going to stay with my LaTeX source files for now. At least ArXiv offers those, not many sites do. To be fair, that approach also has its own set of problems (particularly when people use some extra fancy formatting in their math equations, making the markup hard to read), but I find this to be the best approach for me so far, at least on AI/ML papers.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#47

Post by ansk »

When I open a large pdf on arxiv (100+ MB, not uncommon for ML papers focused on hi-res image generation), there is a significant load time (10+ seconds) before anything is rendered at all other than a loading bar. Does anyone know what the source of this delay is? Is it network-bound or is Chrome just really slow to render large PDFs? Do PDFs have to be fully downloaded to begin rendering? In any case, this delay is my only gripe with arxiv and a progressively rendered HTML doc that instantly loads the document text would be a huge improvement.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#48

Post by mmis1000 »

ForkMeOnTinder wrote: post #32
FredPret wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contrast is massive. I'm much more likely to read the html version; that PDF is deeply off-putting in some hard to define way. Maybe it's the two columns, or the font, or the fact that the format doesn't adjust to fit different screen sizes.

Definitely the two columns for me. It's super annoying skimming a paper and having to scroll down and back up again in a zig-zag pattern.

I think the consuming device matters. A ipad or computer have much wider screen width. One column layout is too wide for them for average people to scan text lines quickly.

While it looks perfectly fine on a phone. Two columns layout looks terrible on a smartphone, the text is too tiny to read comfortably.

It would probably be even better if you can flip it left and right like a ebook instead of scrolling to allocate the content faster. But current design is good enough IMO. (Compare to reading a pdf on cellphone)

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#49

Post by kjkjadksj »

FredPret wrote: post #28
burkaman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the PDF of the same paper for comparison: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.12451.pdf

The contrast is massive. I'm much more likely to read the html version; that PDF is deeply off-putting in some hard to define way. Maybe it's the two columns, or the font, or the fact that the format doesn't adjust to fit different screen sizes.

If you read a lot of papers in your line of work you will quickly appreciate the two columns and justification.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#50

Post by kjkjadksj »

tobias2014 wrote: post #35
FredPret wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contrast is massive. I'm much more likely to read the html version; that PDF is deeply off-putting in some hard to define way. Maybe it's the two columns, or the font, or the fact that the format doesn't adjust to fit different screen sizes.

This is very interesting, because for me it's just the opposite. In particular the two column layout is just more readable and approachable for me. The PDF version also allows for a presentation just as the authors intended. I guess it's good that they offer both now.

The authors don’t format the pdf, the editor does. Authors probably sent a double spaced word document with figures and tables on another file.
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