by aasasd on 2/1/22, 5:29 PM
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.
by hyperhopper on 2/1/22, 4:38 PM
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.
by resoluteteeth on 2/1/22, 3:17 PM
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/
by chubot on 2/1/22, 3:42 PM
by max_ on 2/1/22, 5:12 PM
by jvanderbot on 2/1/22, 7:06 PM
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.
by tingletech on 2/1/22, 4:32 PM
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.
by sandhiw on 2/1/22, 3:35 PM
Awesome, easy way to read papers in the browser with dark mode without inverting image colors (like what Dark Reader does)
by brummm on 2/1/22, 6:43 PM
The Latex created PDF's are 100 times more pleasant to read though.
by steelstraw on 2/1/22, 4:49 PM
Thanks!
What other sites have these kind of URL hacks?
by dark-star on 2/1/22, 5:33 PM
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 isnât 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
by 3pt14159 on 2/1/22, 3:24 PM
Thank you! This is amazing! My only ask is that you bump up the default font size.
by swframe2 on 2/1/22, 4:52 PM
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.
by unmole on 2/2/22, 5:33 AM
Am I a weirdo for preferring PDF to read papers?
by aasasd on 2/1/22, 6:25 PM
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?)
by scaredginger on 2/2/22, 2:15 AM
Excellent, whenever I stumble across a proof that P=NP, I think it would be better in HTML
by hk1337 on 2/1/22, 4:51 PM
This must be a Dartmouth project.
by fullam on 2/1/22, 3:38 PM
Need this for bioarxiv also!
by DLA on 2/2/22, 3:45 AM
This is BEAUTIFUL work!
by gspr on 2/1/22, 4:07 PM
That's a lot less bad than I expected!
by fxtentacle on 2/1/22, 6:11 PM
How does this compare to arxiv-vanity.org?
by baby on 2/1/22, 5:05 PM
Do this with eprint please!
by scythmic_waves on 2/1/22, 4:10 PM
This is great! The hoverable footnotes are a nice touch.
by beanjuiceII on 2/1/22, 8:18 PM
wow thank you for this!
by jppope on 2/1/22, 7:18 PM
thats RAD. awesome work