Curious to see how well it will work. Does anybody here know a robust and not crazy computationally expensive solution to extract tables from fairly clean PDF files (especially non-english)?
ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
211–220 of 325 posts
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#212Earlier 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.
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.
What device and app are you using to read the document?
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#213Earlier 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…
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…
> Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks.
This seems a massive gap in the market - many institutions have funding earmarked for such things.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#214Earlier 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.
A web page is much more than one file. Also, I'm looking for something with end-user control, where they can save the current document statically and long-term.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#215It's a cool feature because it makes the papers more finable, more easily navigatable, easier to read online and faster to scroll through. I am also happy for blind people that they can more easily use ArXive with Braille readers now. (I'm still a fan of printing the PDFs, because I annotate on paper and refer to page numbers, but the HTML feature is in addition to PDF download, not a replacement.) One thing that sti…
This would never happen but in an ideal world, we should be able to click on a citation to jump to the part of the paper that is being referenced and each paper page should have a discussion board so we can easily communicate with the authors and group the discussion in one place instead of us having to google to see if there is relevant discussion on twitter/reddit. We can even put links to talks, tutorials, blogs, github repo, demo, paperswithcode/google scholar/open review, background material, a timeline of citations in tree form on the same page(actually I am seeing more machine learning papers that have a project page that does some of these) or even turn it into a mini wiki. I just think html has so much more potential(especially now with LLM we can do semantic search). I wonder if there would be interest in such a chrom extension overlay.
Related projects:
https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek
https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo
https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv
https://academ.us/article/2111.15588/ (powered by https://github.com/jgm/pandoc I believe)
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks. This seems a massive gap in the market - many institutions have funding earmarked for such things.
I wonder if this is a useful service that an llm could actually outperform humans on.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#217This is brilliant. I don't share academia's love of LateX multi-column PDFs.
I like multi-column text on paper (literally), but it's awkward in digital where you can just shape text on the fly to whatever column size you want
The oroblem is that gaining this responsiveness fundamentally makes your task much more difficult. Instead of just creating a picture you're now writing code that has to be maintained. In my philosophy arxiv is for documents which are set in granite - pictures.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://www.appblit.com/pdfreflow
Any chance of releasing an Android version?
+1
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://www.appblit.com/pdfreflow
Any chance of releasing an Android version?
Gv (part of ghostscript) used to do a good job of this for two column documents. When zoomed in to show one column width of text, the spacebar ran through the top of column 1, then the bottom of column 1, then the top of column 2 and so on.
The amount it scrolled probably depended on the aspect ratio of the window, so it might be multiple key presses to scroll an entire column.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://www.appblit.com/pdfreflow
Any chance of releasing an Android version?
It’s using web technologies so yes it could also be on Android. I’ll see what can be done.