Arxiv Vanity
Learning and science
research paper reader
SHOW HN2017
721points
134comments
#10of 2,242 in 2017
Top 1%of 2017 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
33 positive, 23 neutral or asking, 7 mixed, 16 critical, out of 79 comments about the project. Thread score +0.24.
Design: 11 for, 5 againstIdea: 11 for, 1 againstExecution: 2 for, 8 againstPricing: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Much better reading experience than PDF on mobile
From 3 comments
This is awesome! I was literally rolling my eyes this morning about trying to read an arXiv paper on my phone.
sturmen on HNNice! PDF is the worst format I can think of to present papers. Especially for reading on mobile this will be of great help.
maxxxxx on HNGreat tool for mobile! Have to say I'm too used to PDFs on my laptop, although I can see this replacing it. Two suggestions- 1. Center the text to the screen 2. Justify the text…
deipoda on HN
Useful concept for academic reading
From 2 comments
Hallejuhah, we need to force academics and people who go around touting "whitepapers" to be ripped out of the proprietary PDF era of terrible UX/readability and into modern…
marknadal on HNThis is really cool and has a lot of potential. Academic papers are dense and heavily cross-referenced, so experimenting with new display formats that do more to help the reader…
jpeloquin on HN
Objections
Many papers fail to render or show display errors
From 4 comments
It failed on all three papers I tried it on. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05313 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.06689 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07508
beezle on HNUnfortunately it's failing on first things I tried with a not-so-helpful error message: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1608.04012/…
dbranes on HNLooks like it's failing to process some standard tex commands (e.g. \textup) as well as some user defined macros. See the many display errors in…
j2kun on HNTried three papers: "Could not find Arxiv ID in that URL. Are you sure it's an arxiv.org URL?" Why, yes, I copied-and-pasted directly from the browser tab showing the Arxiv URL.…
rundigen12 on HN
Some readers prefer PDF for layout and print
From 3 comments
I'm not sure I understand. Well, I understand what you're doing but I'm not sure why you'd dislike PDF. PDF has the great benefit of rendering the same on every system. With very…
KGIII on HNIn all three cases I find the original PDFs more pleasant to read. HTML typography is not up to snuff. I read them on a laptop, however, and I can see that this would be useful…
leephillips on HNGreat job! Personally, I prefer the PDF versions, but this could be very useful on a phone.
Cacti on HN
Rendered papers may breach authors' rights and appear in search results
From 1 comment
I have to admit I am not impressed. My first paper, which I tried to render, does not work properly; references are removed and rendered poorly, figures are misplaced and tables…
claudius on HN
Requests
Support references and theorem numbering
From 3 comments
This is an awesome tool. Thanks! Only issue I've run into so far is that cross-references to theorem numbers don't seem to always work correctly, e.g. you'll see a lot of…
ddinh on HNPlease make the References section hyperlinked so clicking on a reference takes you to the paper.
thediff on HNLooks great! Would be even better if the references are urls to other papers.
Kip9000 on HN
Browser extension to jump from arXiv to Arxiv Vanity
From 2 comments
This is cool, it would be nice to have a chrome extension to take me directly to this from the page/pdf.
Eridrus on HNThis is a superb idea! Still not working on some of the papers I read, but hopefully it will soon. I would love to see a bookmarklet that lets me hop from an arxiv page straight…
stefco_ on HN
Support more LaTeX packages and macros
From 2 comments
Looks like it's failing to process some standard tex commands (e.g. \textup) as well as some user defined macros. See the many display errors in…
j2kun on HNNot really my use case as I read PDF papers on an iPad Pro 12.9 inch, which is just fine, but very neat work! I tried it on this one:…
auggierose on HN
Questions
What LaTeX features are unsupported
From 1 comment
I was looking for a way to turn my (soon-to-be-defended) PhD thesis into an epub, and investigated the various LaTeX2Html converters. I was pretty disappointed when I realized…
Drup on HN
Why the name Vanity
From 1 comment
Why "Vanity"?
jwilk on HN
Alternatives named
Distill.pub
From 1 comment
We were frustrated by the experience of reading machine learning papers on screens (particularly phones/tablets). There are lots of good tools for authoring HTML papers (Distill,…
bfirsh on HN
LaTeXML
From 1 comment
A big challenge is to get references working correctly. LaTeXML is quite good at converting latex documents to html [1], including references such as Theorem 2.1, equation (8.1)…
jknz on HN
Pandoc
From 1 comment
Have you seen pandoc? That should be able to do that and the comments about results are usually positive. https://pandoc.org/epub.html One final thing, and wildly off topic, is…
KGIII on HN
arxiv-sanity
From 1 comment
A bit of wordplay on our favourite Arxiv tool. :) http://arxiv-sanity.com/
bfirsh on HN
pdf2htmlEX
From 1 comment
Great work. I've also been working on a similar open-source project "Sharead". https://github.com/strin/sharead It has a chrome extension that uploads Arxiv papers, and you can…
strin on HN