ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format • Hacker News Board

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#271

Post by lsaferite » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 11:39 AM UTC

IlliOnato wrote: post #263

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made these arguments two decades ago when I was still in university that PDF is a horrible format because it's purely præsentational, especially for people with disabilities whose software relies on semantic information. LaTeX last time I used it didn't even have a different symbol for uppercase Alpha and A because the glyphs are indistinguishable. They argued that PDF was superior because the publisher could contr…

For scientific articles pagination is still important, because it's how you refer to a particular part of a paper. If things like font size and line spacing are at the control of the consumer, pagination is not preserved. This problem is harder than you one would think naively.

Seems like they should use detailed section numbering like military documents and laws. Referring by page number seems very course by comparison.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#272

Post by carlossouza » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 12:11 PM UTC

matt1 wrote: post #193

carlossouza wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that (used other features). This is how new papers are ranked here: https://trendingpapers.com

Great site, thanks for sharing. Can you explain how you're determining how many times a paper is cited? Obviously papers include a list of references, but extracting them accurately from the PDF is difficult in my experience (two column formats, ugh) - though the new HTML versions help. And even if you have a list, many authors just mention arXiv paper titles, not their ids, making identifying specific references tri…

Difficult, yes… but not impossible :)

I just extract the titles and look for their respective ids.

The real challenge was how to do that at scale. Only in CS there are well over half a million papers

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#273

Post by borg16 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #245

folmar wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hard override the font in browser, designers never get it right.

what is your font of choice?

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#274

Post by semi-extrinsic » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:19 PM UTC

IlliOnato wrote: post #265

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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? Pretty much for the same reason you cannot press a word and get a pop-up dictionary definition in a paper book.

To be clear, I meant in the LaTeX source code. And there I can already write code that plots equations, I just have to re-type the equation in a new syntax.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#275

Post by semi-extrinsic » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

fsh wrote: post #233

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TeX is a very arcane language, and it doesn't support floating point numbers. Few languages would be less suited for making a plotting library.

Both pgfplots and PSTricks and TikZ are plotting libraries. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard to let them plot an equation written elsewhere in different syntax.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#276

Post by dginev » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:39 PM UTC

trostaft wrote: post #201

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…

For the image widths, there is some CSS fine-tuning that is still needed on the arXiv HTML side. I think that will get fixed soon, just needs the right height directive set.

Getting subfigures emulated via flexbox is one of our more recent LaTeXML enhancements, and still has some ongoing work (working on it today actually). It can be a bit finicky to test - there are easily 20 different ways people can write LaTeX for subfigures in arXiv.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#277

Post by dginev » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:43 PM UTC

svag wrote: post #68

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 :)

That's it in spirit, but in practice it's refreshed:

https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-view-as-html

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#278

Post by miki123211 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

kkylin wrote: post #203

miki123211 wrote: post #46

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…

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…

I learned (the basics of) LaTeX in my last year of middle school, and stuck with it ever since. To be fair, I was into computers since I was a child, played with Rockbox at the age of 10, started to dabble in programming shortly after, so this was a lot less scary than most of the things I was doing already. I took my middle and high school finals (they're kind of like SAT but matter a lot more) by producing LaTeX output, which I then compiled to PDF and printed. The test itself was in braille, as that was all that our government could do.

Throughout college, my first question to most of my professors of math subjects was "do you do LaTeX, and can you give me your source code." Most said yes, and that's how we worked. LaTeX in, LaTeX or PDF out, depending on what the professor preferred.

The amount of LaTeX you need for calculus 1 isn't that great, you could probably teach it to a relatively bright student if you had an hour or two to spare, and then give them the source files. If you have the time, I'd suggest producing "stripped" versions of your files, with as little markup as possible to get your point across and no fancy formatting unless absolutely necessary. The amount of hoops some books and papers jump through to "look nice" drives me crazy.

You could also consider producing, teaching and consuming ASCII math, which seems like an even simpler and friendlier format. I couldn't really use it much in my school career for boring technical reasons, but it looks like a promising option.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#279

Post by miki123211 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

Saigonautica wrote: post #235

kkylin wrote: post #203

Earlier 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…

Interesting! I never thought about this, thank you for sharing. What kind of turn-around time would be practical? Could you point me to any typeset mathematical braille that would be an example of a solution to your problem? Is Nemeth the only important standard, or are others important for you too? I'm wondering if it's practical to set this up as back-office work here in Vietnam. There are some outlying provinces h…

How's English proficiency (and American braille code proficiency) like in Vietnam?

Keep in mind that most blind people who speak English fluently but don't live in an English-speaking country (myself included) can't read English braille, or at least not well. Because of how voluminous Braille is, it uses contractions, single characters that replace common words and character combinations like "the", "would", "ing" or "ed". Those tend to be language specific, never taught outside their country or countries of use, and hard to get accessible electronic materials for. The math codes are completely different too, we use something derived from Marburg, while English-speaking countries use Nemeth. Even basic characters like + and - differ between those two, not to mention more complicated structures. It's not just the dot patterns that are different but also the design principles, like where you put spaces or when you can omit "begin fraction" / "end fraction" characters.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#280

Post by miki123211 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

ahepp wrote: post #133

miki123211 wrote: post #46

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?

Mathpix is trying to achieve something like this, and they do consider the visually impaired market AFAIK, but it's pretty expensive and I have no experience with it personally, so I can't say how good it is.