An open discussion forum for ArXiv papers

Re:An open discussion forum for ArXiv papers by generationP on Sunday September 08, 2024 @06:03PM (#41483629)

I think development on the TeX-to-HTML compiler has slowed down at some point, and it's far from perfect yet. Some of the issues are probably HTML5 limitations, unlikely to be fixed any time soon (unless one wants formulas to become graphics).

But there is another problem: It takes too long to load on mobile and doesn't reflow. I thought mobile was one of the reasons people wanted HTML in the first place!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An open discussion forum for ArXiv papers by amadeuspagel on Sunday September 08, 2024 @06:34PM (#41483813)

In PDFs on arXiv, syntax highlighted codeblocks are graphics.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An open discussion forum for ArXiv papers by davrosthedalek on Monday September 09, 2024 @07:47AM (#41487605)

I think that's essentially only true if they are that in the original source. You can check for yourself, most papers have the TeX source available on arxiv.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:An open discussion forum for ArXiv papers by gwern on Monday September 09, 2024 @06:35PM (#41494916)

> Some of the issues are probably HTML5 limitations, unlikely to be fixed any time soon (unless one wants formulas to become graphics).

You can convert a lot of formulas into either Mathjax/Katex-style fonts or MathML, or even just HTML+Unicode. (I get a very long way with pure HTML+Unicode+CSS on Gwern.net, and didn't even have to write a TeX-to-HTML compiler - just a long LLM prompt: https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/build/latex2u... )

But that's missing the point. Who cares about all of the refinements like reflow or pretty equations, when you are routinely serving massively corrupted and silently incomplete HTML versions? I don't care how good the typography is in your book if it's missing 5% of pages at random and also doesn't have any page numbers or table of contents...

[ Parent | on HN ]