FUCK YES (excuse my profanity). I have a tool that converts HTML to Neural Speech and I always wanted to push arXiv papers through it, but couldn't be bothered with a PDF implementation.
ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
121–130 of 325 posts
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#122https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/
And, of course, https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html However, ar5iv isn't a la carte like arxiv-vanity. They pretty much do last month's papers every month or so. Something like that.
Hi, ar5iv creator here.
You can think of both arxiv-vanity and ar5iv as the "alpha" experiments that lead into the official arXiv "beta" HTML announced today.
Once a few rounds of feedback and improvements are integrated, and the full collection of articles acquires HTML in the main arXiv site, ar5iv will be decommissioned.
The plan is to turn all existing ar5iv links into redirects to the official HTML, and free up the resources for maintaining it. I am not sure what are the plans for maintaining arxiv-vanity, but I suspect they may head down a similar path some time later.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#123What do they use to convert a PDF document to a clean, correct HTML document? It's a difficult space, especially with the variety of layouts you may find in PDF documents...
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#124One 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…
Emacs with Emacspeak has a math reading module.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#125Earlier 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.
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.
You are completely wrong. ArXiv doesn't work like that.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#126PDF is objectively much better than HTML at rendering text documents. And it's not even close. This could easily have been done 10, even 15-20 years ago. That it didn't is not just inertia. Latex and PDF have enormously better text rendering, and the static format locks a state-commit in time that is much easier to go back to and reference/critique. Unlike the intrinsically fluid nature of HTML. For academic work, milestone-like formats, that lock state in time, are useful for those who later build on them. And again, the rendering just doesn't compare and that imparts [sub]conscious quality signals.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#127What do they use to convert a PDF document to a clean, correct HTML document? It's a difficult space, especially with the variety of layouts you may find in PDF documents...
Arxiv encourages users to submit the latex source of their papers rather than the PDF
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#128The tool that it's being used for this offering is this one, https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-readability , just to save a few clicks :)
Wow I did not know they have the LaTeX for all the papers and compile it themselves! That's pretty crazy. What if they don't have packages you need? What if your paper isn't written with LaTeX?
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#129At this point are academic papers simply peer-reviewed blog posts?
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Huh. It would seem like, of all the things which should make it easy to generate the correct accessibility information, the pipeline of compiling a paper from source code in LaTeX should nail it... maybe we should all pitch in to some pool to pay someone to put in the required effort to connect all the dots?
Kind of tangential, but it's also kind of surprising how difficult it is in LaTeX to make a plot of an equation.
Say I have Equation \ref{eq}. Why can't I just say "plot \ref{eq} for x from -6 to 11" and get my graph?
And yes, I know about pgfplots, PSTricks, TikZ etc. But in all those cases, I need to define the same equation twice, in different syntax to boot. It's kind of unsatisfying.