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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

blog.arxiv.org

311–320 of 325 posts

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#311
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Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This would require a change from the currently near-uniformly adopted standard. The problem with this: you need to create a new standard, get everybody to agree to it, and get busy scientists who are concentrating on content and not representation to adapt this new standard in their writing, essentially requiring them to change their habits and spend extra time on writing (which many of them hate), for no obvious gai…

Very hard as it is from physical paper world … and even then you have to make sure version is right as page number change.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#313
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…

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 ou…

Thanks for the suggestions! When you LaTeX your work to turn in, do you work only with the source, or do you have a good way to read the PDF output? I agree the amount of LaTeX needed for calculus is pretty minimal.

One of my students was taking chemistry at the same time, which is (I think) much tougher for blind students. But they also had more teaching assistants for the course.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#314
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…

Our textbook of choice didn't have a braille version, so we sent it out to be converted one chapter at a time. Since textbooks don't change often, a turn-around of weeks is not so bad if we knew the students were going to be in the course.

What would be very useful for me to be able to typeset myself are small things -- homework, quizzes, and (to a lesser extent) exams. Since homework and quizzes often have to adapt to what I actually covered in class, which may or may not match the syllabus, it's hard to rely on sending this out to be typset by others. (Exams are a little easier since they're usually done days ahead of the actual date.)

AFAIK Nemeth is the only standard that matters. If I can typeset a document, send it to the student, and they can get it on a braille display (no need for this to be on paper), it would solve a ton of problems.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#315
post #208

> 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…

Went through it and may I ask whether there is any “personal” level of this ar5iv converter or just one of few mentioned parser.

Btw given we are into quotation academic world, I wonder whether you may have mention Gartner Group to invent that technology curve. To be honest there is a variation I like more which deal with the chasm issue.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#316
post #33

It would be neat if they offered submitters the chance to upload their own HTML version alongside the PDF version, instead of always relying on an automatic conversion process. - I can imagine authors feeling frustrated if someone reaches out about a problem in the HTML version of their paper, but they have no way to correct it except by hoping that a change to the PDF fixes a change to the generated HTML. Easier to…

No, it would not. It's critically important that there is only one "logical" article, albeit with different representations. In other words, a single "source of truth". With "sideloading" of HTML there is no way in general to make sure that the contents of LaTeX (and PDF) on one side and HTML on the other side is the same.

Maybe some day for some papers HTML could be the source of truth instead of LaTeX. After all, the original use case for HTML and the web was academics. The HTML and CSS specs have evolved a lot since then, with support for the typesetting features you need for papers (justified text, hyphenation, page breaks, page numbers, ...) and even math formulas are possible now again natively with MathML thanks to Igalia. Diagrams can be accessible vector SVGs instead of raster images. Referencing, linking, citing, figures, tables, etc have always been native to HTML. It's trivial nowadays too to wrap a headless chromium in a CLI to convert an HTML document to PDF rendered in the exact same way that the browser would (i.e. not some static conversion tool that lags behind standards or has render implementation differences).

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I save an HTML document locally, and annotate it, in an easily sharable form, and in a form that is stable - i.e., in a way that will be readable and useable in 20-50 years?

You say it as if pdf is somehow better. To begin with it's a proprietary format. If Adobe goes bankrupt or obscure tomorrow, pdf will go out of use as a failed technology.

> it's a proprietary format. If Adobe goes bankrupt or obscure tomorrow, pdf will go out of use as a failed technology.

It's an ISO standard with a very large ecosystem outside Adobe. Many users and businesses I know don't use Adobe at all.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#318
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.

It feels quite standard for a paper

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a taste component to it of course, but the history of PDF shows that it's the wrong format for reading on a computer. It was originally meant to be the end result of a publishing process before printing, a layer that sits right between the publishing software and the postscript that gets sent to the printer. This makes the PDF format quite inflexible for reading on a computer, with it being impossible to pro…

> This makes the PDF format quite inflexible for reading on a computer, with it being impossible to properly zoom or adjust the reading experience. As an academic researcher, generally speaking I also prefer PDF, and the inflexibility and static nature is a feature, not a bug. I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc. The exception is if I wanted…

> I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc.

There are many great solutions to this problem, including ones that don't require Javascript at all. This website (https://gwern.net/silk-road) presents a really good example -- every header and sub-header is a clickable anchor. If more granularity is needed, on newer articles most of the paragraphs start with an italicized margin note -- though for technical writing, paragraph anchors might be better. The page also pays careful attention to print CSS and has a 'reader mode' to convert all links to footnotes when printed.

Some websites will also preserve the text you select in a URL anchor, but more often than not this is just cumbersome. It also has a greater risk of not surviving changes to the webpage.

Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format

#320
post #33

It would be neat if they offered submitters the chance to upload their own HTML version alongside the PDF version, instead of always relying on an automatic conversion process. - I can imagine authors feeling frustrated if someone reaches out about a problem in the HTML version of their paper, but they have no way to correct it except by hoping that a change to the PDF fixes a change to the generated HTML. Easier to…

With the shelf life of web technologies, authors would constantly have to maintain their "papers" or they just would not be accessible after a while.

Knuth’s stated intent in maintaining TeX is only to fix bugs, not evolve the system in a way that might break old documents. Not sure if this is equally true for Lamport’s LaTeX macros but it wouldn’t surprise me.
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