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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

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Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#201

Post by trostaft »

Taking a look at a paper I have that went up this month and another that went up before the dec cutoff on ar5iv, they look 90% OK! Figures with side-by-side plots and algorithm environments are the common culprit for being broken though. Particularly in figures, it seems like the width argument isn't being interpreted correctly.

Interestingly this review paper seems to have their side by side figures intact (e.g. fig 2 fig 4). Maybe it's because he used a subfigure like environment (judging by the subcaptions)?

https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1609.04747

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#202

Post by wruza »

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.

Seconded. I can (will) actually just read referenced papers now instead of hesitating to either get a headache or stay uninformed.

Defaults and UX rule the world. It’s unfortunate that $subj wasn’t a thing for so long and probably scared millions of curious minds from material. It is so important.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#203

Post by kkylin »

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…

I teach math at a university. A couple years ago I had two blind students in my section of first-year calculus, and I really struggled with the tooling. Using latexml, I could produce documents that one of the students could use with a screen reader, but the other student never managed to make it work on their machine. Both students prefer braille but I didn't find anything open source that could typeset mathematical braille easily. Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks.

Anyway, if you (or anyone else reading this) has suggestions I'd really appreciate it!

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#204

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

wolverine876 wrote: post #169
nonethewiser wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no straightfoward, standard way to read an html document on another platform. Such as? What doesn’t have a browser but can render pdfs?

I mean, how do I save it locally on one platform and read it on any platform? Or share it with someone else to read (without them downloading software)? I.e., we don't have a standard, local, single-file html format.

> I mean, how do I save it locally on one platform and read it on any platform?

Ctrl/Meta/Cmd + S should do the trick, or "File > Save page", and you get a HTML file you can open in any browser. If there is images, they'll most likely be loaded remotely, or worst case not load at all. But the rest of the structure is there.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#205

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

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?

> Those are issues with JavaScript, not HTML

What about various HTML tags that remote load resources? From script, link, to things like img or CSS `background-image` attribute, added in a `style` attribute.

There is a bunch of ways to do remote requests even without HTML.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#207

Post by blackoil »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #204
wolverine876 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, how do I save it locally on one platform and read it on any platform? Or share it with someone else to read (without them downloading software)? I.e., we don't have a standard, local, single-file html format.

> I mean, how do I save it locally on one platform and read it on any platform? Ctrl/Meta/Cmd + S should do the trick, or "File > Save page", and you get a HTML file you can open in any browser. If there is images, they'll most likely be loaded remotely, or worst case not load at all. But the rest of the structure is there.

> If there is images, they'll most likely be loaded remotely

Most sites have images as a relative path which won't work with saved html and there is also CSS.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#208

Post by dginev »

delhanty wrote: post #197

> If you are familiar with ar5iv, an arXivLabs collaboration, our HTML offering is essentially bringing this impactful project fully “in-house”. Our ultimate goal is to backfill arXiv’s entire corpus so that every paper will have an HTML version, but for now this feature is reserved for new papers. IIRC, ar5iv was created on his own initiative by Deynan Ginev https://twitter.com/dginev/status/1736792316675825981 and…

Thanks for the kind words, but some corrections:

1. My name is Deyan (hi!)

2. ar5iv was the latest frontend incarnation, but our actual work on converting LaTeX to HTML goes back nearly 20 years behind the scenes.

3. I was an undergraduate student when I was introduced to the project back in 2007. It was started "in spirit" by 3 senior co-conspirators back then: Michael Kohlhase, Bruce Miller and Robert Miner. And I am by no means a solitary actor today, even if I may be the chief online presence of the people involved. Bruce is doing the bulk of the hard work on LaTeXML to this day.

I documented some of the history in an invited talk for CICM 2022, which you can find on youtube, or see the slides at:

https://prodg.org/talks/welcome_to_ar5iv

It's really great that the HTML has now reached "home base" in arXiv, and I hope their team gets a lot more of the positive attention going forward - today's achievement is entirely theirs!

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