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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

blog.arxiv.org

141–150 of 325 posts

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#141

What 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...

> The tool that it's being used for this offering is this one, https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-readability, just to save a few clicks :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38726582

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#144
post #74

Earlier 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?

Surprisingly it’s not easy, and depending on the field it can be quite challenging. The reason for this is that TeX captures the visual aspects of typesetting, not the semantic meaning of the mathematics.

A simple example is ‘\sum’ which provides no way to capture the expression being summed over - because that’s not necessary for typesetting. That’s not the case in, say, MathML.

Writing MathML is no fun though because mathematical formulae are visually ambiguous and we rely on the context to know how to read them, e.g. does ‘f(x - 1)’ mean function f called with argument x - 1, or does it mean variable f multiplied by x - 1?

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#145
post #41

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 a…

Great site. Bookmarked it.

Would be nice if I could change timeframe. Top this week, month, year, all time.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#146
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hilariously, I would probably tolerate the HTML version a lot better if it had the font from the PDF (and FWIW, the answer for me is "no: I don't work with LaTeX at all... I just read a lot of papers").

If you disable the font rule

  :root, [data-theme=light] {
    /* --text-font-family: "freight-sans-pro";
  }
it switches to "Noto Serif" that is way easier on the eyes.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel surprised by how succinct, easy-to-understand, and sensible the policy (M-23-22) is: > Default to HTML: HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard for publishing documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. HTML provides numerous advantages (e.g., easier to make accessible, friendlier to assistive technology, more dynamic and responsive, easier to maintain). When developing information for the we…

Hmmm ... accessibility is essential, but PDF is far better for static documents: There's no straightfoward, standard way to read an html document on another platform. Also, the html document may not be readable in 10+ years (unlike most PDFs), and updates are too fluid and hard to track. I think the general problem is that the end-user doesn't control an html document, e.g., for annotation, as a local record, etc.

> There's no straightfoward, standard way to read an html document on another platform.

What do you think of the epub format?

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#148
post #41

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 a…

Would love to see a comments feature at the bottom there. Reddit / HN style

Love the concept though. Added it to my Home Screen on iOS

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#149
post #41

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 a…

Works in Chrome, but does not seem to work in Firefox.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#150
post #133

Earlier 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…

Do you think there's potential for language models to play a role here? I know that AI can get tossed around as a buzzword, but hasn't it proved quite successful in fields like computer vision? I'm not deeply familiar with the state of that art, but it seems like recovering the metadata from a PDF generated by LaTeX would be no more impressive than many other things we're currently seeing language models achieve?

You wouldn't need to use computer vision on a picture of the PDF. arXiv has the tex source for most of the papers. An LLM trained on code could do a pretty good job of translating tex to readable html with a bit of effort.
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