So, I'm seeing a lot of chatter in the thread about LaTeX and converting that to HTML and PDF, so LaTeX should be the superior single source of truth. Please keep in mind that many areas of science think of latex as an allergy. I even have a colleague, a plasma physicist, who strongly encourages his team to not use LaTeX because a) collaborators get confused and b) it can be a massive time suck.
ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
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Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#292[deleted]
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#293So, I'm seeing a lot of chatter in the thread about LaTeX and converting that to HTML and PDF, so LaTeX should be the superior single source of truth. Please keep in mind that many areas of science think of latex as an allergy. I even have a colleague, a plasma physicist, who strongly encourages his team to not use LaTeX because a) collaborators get confused and b) it can be a massive time suck.
I agree with your colleague.
At my institution, all of the lowest quality drafts I read are made with latex. I think it's because the programs people use to write latex do not have spelling and grammar checking. Also, the people that prefer latex, are the same types of people that are more interested in technical things, than spelling and grammar.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
...What are you talking about? HTML files are readable on basically every platform, even moreso because they are fundamentally text files (unlike PDFs, which are binaries). PDFs need special software, html can be read on the command line . Likewise, HTML is dead simple to edit and annotate. Seriously, name a single device that has PDF support that doesn't allow you to view HTML. I think you're conflating "html" and "…
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?
Basically any HTML document from 20-30 years ago (can't go any further because it didn't exist 50 years ago) will be completely readable and usable. The only issue is people creating content (not styling) in formats besides HTML.
As far as annotations, you can use the native [1] tag, or strikethough, but if you mean "literally drawing on the text" then, yeah, you're looking for an image format at that point (which is fundamentally what PDF is), but we shouldn't default to storing text in image formats just because of one specific use case. (Also, as I said above, the only reason tools exist to easily do that in PDFs exist is because everyone insists on using a format that's hard to edit. )
Also, note that the context I was responding to was US legal documents, not something more presentation-heavy.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#295> 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…
I remember stumbling upon your work long ago when I was working on a project to have "e-zines" that consumed a series of `article` class files and rendered them out into PDF and HTML as a series package.
I had come across latex2html, Dan Gildea's project, and found myself unpleasantly dissatisfied with how it worked. As I understand it, it's more a "half implementation of lots of packages" rather than what ar5iv seems to be, which is "enough of the core LaTeX engine producing HTML instead of DVI"? I'd love to know more about the nitty gritty of how the engine does its thing.
I'm curious: How has modern web tech (e.g. WebAssembly, Canvas, etc) helped or gotten in the way of getting good LaTeX rendering in the browser?
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#296For anyone who needs it, arxiv-vanity is amazing: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/
arxiv-sanity-lite: https://github.com/karpathy/arxiv-sanity-lite
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you work extensively with LaTeX? Two columns is good, albeit annoying on mobile. But the font. The typeface kills me, and almost every LaTeX-generated document sports it.
Hilariously, I would probably tolerate the HTML version a lot better if it had the font from the PDF (and FWIW, the answer for me is "no: I don't work with LaTeX at all... I just read a lot of papers").
https://github.com/neilpanchal/spinzero-jupyter-theme /fonts/{cmu-text,cmu-mono} :
> "Computer Modern" is used for body text to give it a professional/academic look
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I remember stumbling upon your work long ago when I was working on a project to have "e-zines" that consumed a series of `article` class files and rendered them out into PDF and HTML as a series package. I had come across latex2html, Dan Gildea's project, and found myself unpleasantly dissatisfied with how it worked. As I understand it, it's more a "half implementation of lots of packages" rather than what ar5iv seem…
Right, that's LaTeXML - it tries to emulate as much as possible of the TeX typesetting system, while retaining enough control to emit structured markup.
Which also allows us (and generally all contributors of latexml package support) to conveniently maintain various parallel data structures and metadata needed along the way.
Modern HTML is very often helpful to produce higher quality article renderings. Examples:
1. we recently started using flexbox for subfigures, allowing them to reflow.
2. we have started emitting ARIA accessibility annotations (there is now an "alt" key for \includegraphics)
3. MathML Core allowed us to have native web rendering for math expressions in every browser.
As to LaTeX rendering in the browser, there are various other projects out there you could look up with partial support. For latexml the WebAssembly route seems most realistic, as we are undergoing a rewrite in Rust. But there are quite a number of pieces to flesh out before we get there.
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#299Is there an open source tool to convert any PDF to something like this?
Re: ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
#300Is there an open source tool to convert any PDF to something like this?
It sounds like (from the shout-out in the post) they're using https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/ to convert the paper's LaTeX into HTML, not from PDF.
The most versatile tool I know of for converting various document formats, including PDF to HTML, is the oss ebook tool Calibre: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion.html
I have seen https://pdfbox.apache.org/ used for extracting text from PDFs for analysis, but you won't get HTML output.