Ugh. I don't belong to the target audience (people with disabilities) but the typesetting doesn't exactly look pleasant on my machine (Chrome on Linux).
ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
91–100 of 325 posts
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#92A lot of academic journals (say from Springer) also offer HTML formats for papers published in the past decade or so, which I personally often find more convenient for reading purposes than PDFs. For example, I parse text a lot faster if I use a regex to split each paragraph into sentences and place a linebreak after each sentence, or if I do natural language "syntax highlighting" by assigning a distinctive color to functional words indicating logical structure like 'if/then', 'and', 'or', 'not', 'because', and 'is'. And sometimes it really improves readability to be able to do "semantic highlighting", in the sense of say assigning a different hashed color to each proper name (or each labeled thesis, etc) that occurs in the paper. Such manipulations are basically impossible with PDFs. It makes me wish sci-hub would start archiving HTML versions in addition to PDFs!
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#93For 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 a…
Love to see Energent Mind continuing to innovate!
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#94One 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…
I wrote an app called PDF Reflow that reflows the original PDF using image processing to cut out words into tiles so you see the reflowed version of the text in their original look.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, two column layouts are very common in the physical sciences, or at least in physics which I'm more familliar with. I have a feeling that the reason is at least partly to save page space when using displayed math (e.g. equations that are formatted in a break between blocks of text), which use the full text width (i.e. the width of one column) to display what may be much less than half a page wide.
It makes sense - for paper. But pixels are infinite - HTML is far better for screen display, which is how people read things nowadays. The extra column next to the one I'm reading introduces a lot of visual noise, and the content is hard enough as it is. I'm sure physicists have all gotten used to it, but it certainly trips me up.
> The extra column next to the one I'm reading introduces a lot of visual noise
Papers are generally not read start to finish in one go: there's lots of rereading and jumping back and forth between key parts, and anything that moves them further apart makes this harder.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#96Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#97Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#9830 years after HTML was invented to support accessibility and collaboration for research and academia and the same day the White House released their new accessibility guidance which happens to be the first time they've published formal new policy natively has HTML rather than PDF - https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/management/ofcio/m-24-08-stre...
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you work extensively with LaTeX? Two columns is good, albeit annoying on mobile. But the font. The typeface kills me, and almost every LaTeX-generated document sports it.
Hating on Computer Modern (ok, probably now Latin Modern) is something close to blasphemy.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Admittedly, I don't read research papers. But with HTML, surely the choice between one or two columns is a checkbox away.
Which checkbox? I cannot find anything relevant in any of the 3 browsers I use (Vivialdi, Firefox, Chrome). Would really appreciate this option. A quick search gave some apparently unmaintained browser extensions, and it's it.
No, I'm saying there should be a checkbox. That way, you can switch between two columns formatted like LaTeX and that font they always use, and one column with Helvetica / Arial.