Seeing the Gemini 3 capabilities, I can imagine a near future where file formats are effectively irrelevant.
HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
11–20 of 141 posts
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#12Is this new or somehow updated? HTML versions of papers have been available for several years now. EDIT: indeed, it was introduced in 2023: https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/21/accessibility-update-arxiv...
From the paper... Why "experimental" HTML? Did you know that 90% of submissions to arXiv are in TeX format, mostly LaTeX? That poses a unique accessibility challenge: to accurately convert from TeX—a very extensible language used in myriad unique ways by authors—to HTML, a language that is much more accessible to screen readers and text-to-speech software, screen magnifiers, and mobile devices. In addition to the tec…
No I mean _arXiv_ has had experimental support for generating HTML versions of papers for years now. If you visit arXiv, you'll see a lot of papers have generated HTML alongside the usual PDF, so I'm trying to understand whether the article discussed any new developments. It seems like it's not new at all
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#13Can't help but wonder if this was motivated in part by people feeding papers into LLMs for summary, search, or review. PDF is awful for LLMs. You're effectively pigeonholed into using (PAYING for) Adobe's proprietary app and models which barely hold a candle to Gemini or Claude. There are PDF-to-text converters, but they often munge up the formatting.
Not sure when you last tried, but Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT have all supported pretty effective PDF input for quite a while.
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#14Maybe unpopular, but papers should be in n markdown flavor to be determined. Just to have them more machine readable.
Not unpopular, but a lot of the publishing companies would have to agree to that and make their own formatting/structure rules.
I also haven’t had good luck with images/graphs/custom tables in anything but typist/latex.
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#15Seeing the Gemini 3 capabilities, I can imagine a near future where file formats are effectively irrelevant.
Tell that to publishing companies.
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#16Pandoc can convert to svg. It can then be inlined in html. Looks just like latex, though copy/paste isn't very useful
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#17Seeing the Gemini 3 capabilities, I can imagine a near future where file formats are effectively irrelevant.
Files.
Truth in general, if we aren't careful.
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#18[Sept 2023] as per the wayback machine.
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#19Maybe unpopular, but papers should be in n markdown flavor to be determined. Just to have them more machine readable.
Compared to HTML, Markdown is very bad at being mahcine-readable.
Re: HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
#20Unfortunately I didn't see the recommendation there on what can be done for old papers. I checked, and only my papers after 2022 have an HTML version. I wish they'd make some kind of 'try html' button for those.
Do the older papers work via [Ar5iv](https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/) ?
> View any arXiv article URL [in HTML] by changing the X to a 5
The line
> Sources upto the end of November 2025.
sounds to me like this is indeed intended for older articles.