[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Replace the X with a 5 in arXiv.org to disp...
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Tell HN: Replace the X with a 5 in arXiv.org to display a paper in
HTML
Check it out: https://ar5iv.org/pdf/2106.10522.pdf
Author : bgschulman31
Score : 300 points
Date : 2022-02-01 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
| chubot wrote:
| Very nice idea, although the first PDF I tried wasn't available,
| and the second one seems to be missing a lot:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.00888.pdf (19 pages)
|
| https://ar5iv.org/html/2001.00888 (missing content)
|
| This is no doubt a hard problem ...
| tech-no-logical wrote:
| seems it craps out on the monospaced bits of text ?
| dginev wrote:
| If you have a spare minute, please pay a visit to the "report
| issue" button at the bottom.
|
| Indeed - hard problem and a messy solution. I have no easy
| answers.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| wow thank you for this!
| steelstraw wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| What other sites have these kind of URL hacks?
| slig wrote:
| Youtube has the type "nsfw" before any youtube.com address to
| bypass the age-restriction.
| galori wrote:
| replace reddit.com with redditp.com to make it into a slide
| show of the images in the sub
|
| example:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/ -->
| https://www.redditp.com/r/gifs/
|
| (there are a few other similar reddit --> image gallery url
| hacks, just google for them)
| dark-star wrote:
| I checked the example link, and it has trouble rendering utf-8 or
| something (search for the Feynman quote about "nature", it starts
| with "Nature isnat classical...", or the poem at the end)
|
| I wonder how well it works with more complicated mathematical
| formulas containing greek or arabic letters (although the example
| in that paper look fine to me), or other non-ASCII scripts.
|
| other than that, this looks pretty amazing
| aasasd wrote:
| By the way: if you can, it would probably be wise to drop
| justified alignment, and make text aligned to the left. Rectangle
| blocks of text only look good from a distance--when actually
| trying to read, the differing inter-word spaces just make the
| experience jarring. It's especially bad on phones, which is a
| prime use-case for the HTML conversion.
|
| (Though, from 'tell HN', the poster is probably not the site
| author, right?)
| dginev wrote:
| HN can obviously summon the site author (hi!)
|
| What I was wondering - and still am - shouldn't it be possible
| to get to a "Pleasant" justified layout on the web in general?
|
| The jagged left-aligned paragraphs are some of the first bits
| people point to when invoking "my PDF looks better". I
| definitely am not saying I did it perfectly, but shouldn't it
| be _possible_ to get a good justified scientific article on the
| web? Why not?
| aasasd wrote:
| Hi.
|
| "Looks better" only works in regard to justification when one
| is admiring a page overall. However, that's not how people
| actually read text. They look at words in lines, and at that
| time uneven spacing keeps tripping the eye up. I know this
| argument, but there's no way around this discussion, and
| that's all there is to say about it (so far). Nicely looking
| bricks of paragraphs won't make the eye glide smoothly over
| the holes.
|
| Page layout programs spend some CPU time on fiddling the
| hyphenation until the spacing is even. Browsers can't afford
| to do that, afaik (not sure about currently, but that was the
| situation a while back). Moreover, from what I vaguely heard,
| the HTML specification defines paragraphs in such a way that
| browsers don't even have the freedom to fiddle the paragraph
| height--something about the height being the minimum for the
| text on hand, or something like that.
|
| Even if you insist to keep justification on desktop (though I
| personally can see the holes clearly)--for the love of good,
| please disable it on phones. It's just a mess there.
| dginev wrote:
| Got it. So even with hyphenation, the gaps are still bad
| enough that you'd consider the current ar5iv rendering
| bumpy and distracting?
|
| I think I can see that, but it's _almost_ there, which is
| why it feels like there has to be something I 'm missing
| for it to justify "just right".
|
| But yes, at the least you've convinced me we should have a
| separate theme that goes left-aligned, and possibly makes a
| number of other choices that maximize readability.
|
| Since I'd still want the folks that want "as good as PDF",
| to feel justified for sticking around.
| aasasd wrote:
| I _may_ have a better eye for it than most, all the way
| to having made my own browser extension to turn
| justification on paragraphs off. However, if I do turn on
| left-aligning on the linked example, I get plenty of very
| jagged right edges--which means that with justification
| all that uneven space gets shoved between words.
| hk1337 wrote:
| This must be a Dartmouth project.
| dginev wrote:
| What's a Dartmouth?
| hyperhopper wrote:
| My biggest complaint with all these super useful sites is that I
| can never remember them when I need them. Replace this in YouTube
| to bypass country restrictions, replace that in arxiv to view in
| browser, etc.
|
| I wish somebody could make an extension or repository system to
| store all these, and prompt you sometimes when on the sites.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Ah, this comment prompted me to add this to my Anki, so thanks!
| I got frustrated never remembering https://remove-js.com , so
| added it to a deck on Anki and now I'm unlikely to ever forget
| it. This is useful enough to go on the deck too.
| siva7 wrote:
| I'm using Anki to not forget my fitness workouts
| kazinator wrote:
| Anki is great for remembering your fitness workouts, if you
| plan to sabotage your fitness with increasing intervals
| between workouts. :)
| Kelamir wrote:
| Hihi. That's true. Maybe an addon that keeps cards' ease
| at the same rate would do.
|
| By the way, have you checked out Migaku's vacation add-
| on? I suggested it to you a while ago.
| theWreckluse wrote:
| Ah, I always forget about Anki! Wish there were an app to
| remind me of Anki when I need it the most.
| siva7 wrote:
| The anki app reminds you of anki
| gcoladon wrote:
| I love Anki and use it like you do, it sounds like.
| xigoi wrote:
| Does RemoveJS do anything that the "block scripts" button on
| uBlock doesn't?
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Allows me to share it as a link to my parents, for example.
|
| During the initial pandemic period, there were news
| articles I wanted to share with useful information. But the
| pages were full of Javascript based crap that guiding them
| on how to find the information became a task of its own.
| RemoveJS was very helpful in making those sites accessible
| to them.
| sli wrote:
| I'd tell you, but RemoveJS blocks VPN users from viewing
| their site while uBlock does not.
| curiousllama wrote:
| I agree, I can't wait to forget about what the name of the
| repository is
| EGreg wrote:
| I can't wait to turn down at least $6B offer for my company
| :)
| FrozenVoid wrote:
| I usually make a userscript for these sites, which add it
| automatically. Its a one-liner for simple link insertion.
| https://github.com/FrozenVoid/Userscripts/blob/main/Arxiv/Ar...
| kazinator wrote:
| The Redirector add-on for Firefox provides pattern-based
| (regex and glob) URL redirection on the browser side. You can
| just add rules to its configuration rather than new
| userscripts.
|
| I used in the past to locally correct for broken links within
| intranet/CI pages. E.g. something correctably wrong with a
| gerrit link, or whatever.
| umvi wrote:
| Replace "github.com" with "github.dev" or "github1s.com" on any
| repo
| brummm wrote:
| The Latex created PDF's are 100 times more pleasant to read
| though.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Problem is, the Latex created PDF's have fixed width and read
| horribly on smaller screens as a result, with no option of a
| dark mode. Often on mobile you'll be forced to download the PDF
| as well.
| baby wrote:
| Do this with eprint please!
| max_ wrote:
| The entire project is open source[0].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv
| fxtentacle wrote:
| How does this compare to arxiv-vanity.org?
| dginev wrote:
| Same HTML backend generator (latexml), different frontends, and
| different coverage of arXiv.
|
| Also, ar5iv may disappear very quickly, since I am unsure if
| it's more helpful or harmful. But I'll definitely lean on the
| public attention to keep asking arXiv to integrate an HTML
| preview for their articles. In the one-and-only arxiv.org
| itself.
|
| Lastly, one difference that may ignite a curious debate is that
| ar5iv is committed to being MathML-native. Yes. MathML is the
| only markup used for math syntax, and you'll see it rendered
| directly, undisturbed, with Firefox today.
|
| Over 500 million MathML elements in the full dataset too,
| pretty awe-inspiring.
| jppope wrote:
| thats RAD. awesome work
| swframe2 wrote:
| Please consider adding a little bit of javascript to find and
| display the text that describes the variable in a formula when
| the mouse hovers over it. Even better would be to allow signed-in
| users (or paid subscribers) to add annotations (and links to
| youtube videos).
|
| I would prefer if your site requires a paid subscription so you
| can incentivize people to annotate the content. For a paper
| author, making the paper terse and complex is more impressive but
| for the rest of us it is very tedious to decipher.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Nice. It looks like a site with a similar idea was posted to hn
| before[1], but the result from ar5iv seems to be a bit
| slicker/cleaner than that site.
|
| 1: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/
| jessriedel wrote:
| Unfortunatley, ar5iv also only hosts the _first_ version of the
| paper, while arxiv-vanity only hosts the _last_.
| dginev wrote:
| Which is intentional. ar5iv does not aim to be a live preview
| service, or replace arXiv.
|
| The primary aim is to serve the community with the outputs we
| have, while we improve the coverage and fidelity of our
| generator.
|
| And yes, using only the official sources arXiv has released
| for reuse: https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3
|
| This is indeed a major difference with -vanity
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > The primary aim is to serve the community with the
| outputs we have, while we improve the coverage and fidelity
| of our generator.
|
| Could you explain what you mean here? Who is "we" - I
| assume ar5iv? "while we improve the coverage and fidelity
| of our generator" <-- does this mean this is a temporary
| situation, and in the future multiple versions of the paper
| will be available?
| dginev wrote:
| Certainly, sorry for the confusion.
|
| There's actually multiple "we", since there are two
| institutions involved, and one foil character - I'm the
| only one responsible for ar5iv "the website", in a
| personal capacity.
|
| The fidelity of the generator has the "we" of the team
| behind LaTeXML, the TeX-to-HTML conversion tool. That is
| in many ways the most important project to remember here,
| as that is what we want to actively improve to a point
| where it is "good enough" in creating HTML over the
| entirety of arXiv.
|
| The institution hosting the website, and wanting to
| "serve a community" is KWARC, a research group at the
| university of FAU-Erlangen in Germany. There are all
| kinds of projects and services brewing on that end, which
| have interplay with the HTML data behind ar5iv, but are
| not directly on the site.
|
| And as to all of us reading HN, I think we are actually
| interested in arXiv itself being maximally useful. And so
| is the ar5iv site - it's a temporary deployment, that
| really is aiming to reintegrate back into the arxiv.org
| site, and general infrastructure.
|
| If/when that happens is unclear, but in the meantime
| there is a lot of improvements that can be made, both in
| what HTML can be generated, deciding what the markup of
| scientific documents _ought to be_ in the first place, as
| well as gaining some insights for what new problems arXiv
| would encounter if they served HTML.
| dginev wrote:
| Oh, and the last question - yes, if arXiv integrates the
| feature, they will be able to serve any of the versions,
| including the most recent one.
|
| I can _technically_ implement that, but I really don 't
| want to, as I see it as crossing a certain line. Seeing
| ar5iv as a limited, constrained, service is a good thing
| - I think it clearly communicates that _I_ do not want to
| compete with arXiv.
| visarga wrote:
| Unlike Ar5iv, Arxiv-vanity will also show papers more recent
| than a month, which are usually the papers you want to open.
| gspr wrote:
| That's a lot less bad than I expected!
| dginev wrote:
| Thanks!
| sandhiw wrote:
| Awesome, easy way to read papers in the browser with dark mode
| without inverting image colors (like what Dark Reader does)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Before you get too excited:
|
| "We are usually at least a month behind the live arXiv article
| list.
|
| Also, we can only serve papers submitted with their LaTeX
| sources."
|
| Moderate excitement is probably warranted, though.
| dynm wrote:
| If a paper is prepared in latex, arxiv will detect that and
| insist that the sources are included. (They compile the pdf
| themselves.) So I think the second point shouldn't be much of a
| problem in fields where everyone uses latex.
| max_ wrote:
| The project is open source, so this can easily be ported to any
| site[0]. [0]: https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv
| tingletech wrote:
| arXiv have the advantage that they have LaTeX source for a
| majority of their submissions. Much easier to convert that to
| HTML that any arbitrary PDF.
| evanb wrote:
| For any arXiv submission that was submitted via LaTeX, you can
| download the source.
| jessriedel wrote:
| This was a very far-sighted move by, I believe, Paul Ginsparg
| back in the early days. It significantly increases the headache
| of submitting to the arXiv because you have to get your tex
| file to compile with the tex distribution on _their_ servers
| rather than just on your own home box. But it makes the arxiv
| vastly more future proof than it would be if you could just
| upload PDFs.
| scythmic_waves wrote:
| This is great! The hoverable footnotes are a nice touch.
| fullam wrote:
| Need this for bioarxiv also!
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| bioRxiv converts PDFs to full-text already. They're right there
| on the bioRxiv web site--just click the "Full text" tab. For
| example, our most recent bioRxiv preprint:
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.07.475366v1....
|
| If you want to do URL munging instead of using the UI, just add
| `.full` to the end of the URL ;)
|
| This doesn't require that the manuscript be submitted in any
| particular format either. There are humans involved in making
| sure the full text formatting from PDF is good.
| aasasd wrote:
| People put in effort making PDFs and ensuring that nobody can
| read them without either a 14" portrait screen or a ton of
| scrolling--and you had to come along and ruin that carefully laid
| out inconvenience? What's wrong with you.
|
| The incredibly complex layout of 'a wall of text and occasional
| pictures' is there for a reason. That's what the authors wanted,
| and only PDF is up to the task of representing such delicate
| formatting.
| [deleted]
| shishy wrote:
| Not sure if this is sarcasm... but I don't think OP made this
| (https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv), they are just sharing.
|
| Besides I don't think this is meant to be a total replacement
| that everyone is going to magically use and abandon PDFs, it
| might just be a convenience within a workflow to skim and check
| the full PDF if necessary.
| ouid wrote:
| I think the holes on your sarcasm filter might be too large.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I used to think I could recognize sarcasm whenever I saw
| it. Then I lived through the past few years.
| ouid wrote:
| I'm not making detailed arguments about what your sarcasm
| filter should be, but if this comment isn't detected as
| sarcasm, you should turn a knob somewhere.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Thank you! This is amazing! My only ask is that you bump up the
| default font size.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Don't most browsers remember your zoom when you revisit a
| website?
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Yes, but why have such an hard to read default?
| Kelamir wrote:
| I'm not sure but it could be that it makes it easier to
| read on big displays. Of course this isn't very Responsive
| Design like. I will be glad to be proven wrong. Interested
| in why HN has such a small font by default as well.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Maybe it's a mobile issue? I've never adjusted zoom in my
| phone.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I was going to suggest bump up the saturation/blackness of the
| font so that it's easier to read.
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(page generated 2022-02-01 23:01 UTC)