One thing I would love to see from the arxiv sites is a publicly available download of an SQLite database . They have a bunch of PDFs, and latex source - but the real killer would be a database with just the text for each section, and then the ability to generate* the pdf, using various different styles. This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy. I suppose the images could be stored i…
> This would save an enormous amount of space, and make things far more tidy. Why? The output pdf is typically smaller than the input that produces it. Using rendered pdfs seems simple and very natural, and at worst can use twice the total amount of space.
Although, I had no idea PDFs were smaller than the input. I thought that they were substantially larger actually. But regardless, storing things twice is wasteful.