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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

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Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#81

Post by jabroni_salad »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #49
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.

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

Only problem is jagoffs like me who need the text to be bigger. On PDFs you now get to experience a horizontal scrollbar. HTML has text reflow and I can set the line length by resizing the window. I'm willing to make a lot of sacrifices for that experience.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#82

Post by jraph »

tiagod wrote: post #60
jez wrote: post #33

It would be neat if they offered submitters the chance to upload their own HTML version alongside the PDF version, instead of always relying on an automatic conversion process. - I can imagine authors feeling frustrated if someone reaches out about a problem in the HTML version of their paper, but they have no way to correct it except by hoping that a change to the PDF fixes a change to the generated HTML. Easier to…

I was under the impression the source authors publish to arxiv was a latex file

It is.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#83

Post by IlliOnato »

degenerate wrote: post #63
cozzyd wrote: post #23

doesn't work great with long author lists... https://browse.arxiv.org/html/2312.12907v1

The PDF is worse, so there is no simple answer to this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.12907v1.pdf At least the HTML version pairs each author with their affiliations, instead of the PDF which has all the names on page 1, and all the affiliations on page 2. That's completely unreadable.

For me the PDF is much better. It's compact and clean, if I really need to see an affiliation for a particular author, it's really easy to do so in the PDF, not so in the HTML.

It's highly unlikely anybody will read an entire author list this long; typically you would read the first two or three names, or check if some particular name is on the list. So the compactness of the list and being able to quickly get to the article contents is important.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#84

Post by upbeat_general »

ansk wrote: post #47

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…

I have the same issue. From what I can tell it’s just network-bound and the Arxiv servers are slow. They theoretically allow for you to setup a caching server but after spending a while trying to get it setup, I haven’t been able to get it to work.

https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/cache.html

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#85

Post by PaulHoule »

mmis1000 wrote: post #43
winwang wrote: post #15

Probably more accessible in general. (PDF) Papers are psychologically scary.

Pdf is by design a image format that can also embed text. It just don't have the primitives to properly retain the article structure.

Nah, it's a super-complex system that creates a graph of components, can draw vectors like PostScript, can embed 3-d models, etc. The spec is here

https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...

if you look at sections 14.6 through 14.10 you will find quite baroque facilities for representing the structure of documents in great detail, making documents with accessibility data, making documents that can reflow with HTML, etc. Note to mention the 14.11 stuff which addresses problems with high end printing (say you want to make litho plates for a book.)

For that matter sections 14.4 and 14.5 describe facilities that can be used to add additional private data to PDF files for particular applications. For instance Adobe Illustrator's files are PDF files with some extra private data, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoPDF

I like to complain that PDF has no facility to draw a circle but instead makes you approximate a circle with (accursed) Bézier curves but other than that the main complaint people make about PDF is that it is too complicated not that it is lacking this feature or that feature.

Contrast that to a highly opinionated document format like DjVu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu

which came out around the same time as PDF and is specialized for the problem of scanned documents and works by decomposing the document into three layers, one of which is a bilevel layer intended to represent text. All three layers have specialized coding schemes, the text layer in particular tries to identify that every copy of (say) the letter "e" or the character "漢" is the same and reuse s the same bitmap for them.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#86

Post by layer8 »

digging wrote: post #71
layer8 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’d have to define and document a “safe” subset of HTML, and implement a filter/checker for it. Otherwise we’d end up with papers containing ads and tracking and XSS vulnerabilities and whatnot.

Those are issues with JavaScript, not HTML. Wouldn't filtering out iframes pretty much keep us in the clear?

The parent wanted interactive 3D plots, which means JavaScript embedded in or linked from the HTML. Then there‘s stuff like JavaScript embedded in SVG.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#87

Post by mattigames »

cozzyd wrote: post #76
degenerate wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PDF is worse, so there is no simple answer to this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.12907v1.pdf At least the HTML version pairs each author with their affiliations, instead of the PDF which has all the names on page 1, and all the affiliations on page 2. That's completely unreadable.

The PDF is better because I'm trained to scroll past the author list. That takes forever on the html version .

You can click the "Introduction" anchor on the left side and it scrolls for you past the author list

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#88

Post by [deleted] »

miki123211 wrote: post #46
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 f…

[deleted]

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#89

Post by IlliOnato »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #17
gwern wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except that the errors made by an LLM might be harder to spot then converter errors that typically are very blatant, and don't usually alter text (perhaps just drop parts of it).

Also, a bug in a converter is conceptually much easier to fix than to re-train your LLM.

I am not sure that AI in it's current state is useful when "high fidelity" is required.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#90

Post by cozzyd »

mattigames wrote: post #87
cozzyd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PDF is better because I'm trained to scroll past the author list. That takes forever on the html version .

You can click the "Introduction" anchor on the left side and it scrolls for you past the author list

well it skips the abstract too, but yes, you can scroll back up to see it.
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