article { text-justify: Knuth-Plass; }
If only.
ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
221–230 of 325 posts
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pdf is by design a image format that can also embed text. It just don't have the primitives to properly retain the article structure.
Nah, it's a super-complex system that creates a graph of components, can draw vectors like PostScript, can embed 3-d models, etc. The spec is here https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard... if you look at sections 14.6 through 14.10 you will find quite baroque facilities for representing the structure of documents in great detail, making documents with accessibility data, making documents that ca…
The adode can surely add whatever extension they want to address whatever problem. But unfortunately, most implementation outside of Adobe acrobat itself won't implement all of them. Most library would just implement basic part for printing and marking (At best, supports forms and javascript). That part is basically non-exist for anyone.
There is a reason that most people still use docx for forms even pdf technically support forms.
PS: pdf reader of firefox and chrome don't really supports forms until very late versions.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#223Nice.... a website that offers even more web pages.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#224IMO pdf and HTML optimize for different things. pdf is easy and pretty. HTML is easy and responsive. But making pdf responsive is impossible and making HTML pretty is not easy. I think having arxiv for well-polished pretty documents, not responsive ugly documents. Most researchers don't have time to make an HTML responsive and pretty.
Am researcher, care about responsiveness way more than pretty. I am super glad for the option. Downloading PDFs is super annoying. I'm stoked.
Well... download html is even harder nowadays, because many pages are dynamically generated. Although there are surely some browser extensions that can help you to finish it in a few clicks..
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#225Earlier 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.
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.
Two column is the default in astronomy also.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#226Earlier 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.
Not only is this wrong about physics/astronomy, I regularly use the arxiv version because the typography is better (e.g. in the published paper an equation is split with part of the equation being at the bottom of one column, and the top of the next, whereas the equation is on one line in the arxiv version).
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#227Unfortunately, I am from Iran so I can't use this new feature. I got '403 Forbidden' message from the arXiv server. Worse than that, I totally lost my access to arXiv since they changed their CDN to fastly, because fucking mullahs don't like fastly!
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#228It'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,…
I think https://web.hypothes.is/ would be of interest to you.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#229The 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?
> What if they don't have packages you need?
Unlikely. But if so, you can provide the packages yourself: https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit_tex.html#wegotem
> What if your paper isn't written with LaTeX?
Then they still accept PDF or HTML. See: https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html#formats-for-te...
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#230What I would like is for ArXiv to have an LLM to rewrite all papers away from the stodgy, stilted language prevalent in every paper. Just write clearly gang, use proper paragraph breaks and stop with the run-on sentences.