Paper to HTML
Learning and science
academic paper conversion
SHOW HN2021
153points
58comments
#319of 2,533 in 2021
Top 13%of 2021 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
4 positive, 11 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 6 critical, out of 23 comments about the project. Thread score -0.05.
Idea: 3 for, 1 againstExecution: 0 for, 3 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 1 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 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
Excellent idea for accessibility and reading academic papers
From 3 comments
This is amazing! Will make my (offline-only) Kindle finally display scientific papers. Took a random link of arxiv and it worked like a charm, including TOC. will this be OS'ed?
chrisMyzel on HNHaven't tried it yet, but a very cool concept. As per other recent discussions on HN I think the general accessibility of academic papers is ripe for improvement.
tailspin2019 on HNI am so amazed at the work you guys are doing at AI2 & the Semantic Scholar project. You guys are really fixing a broken system of research and discovery which suffers from…
jimmySixDOF on HN
Objections
Math and equations extract poorly or not at all
From 3 comments
I tried that a few days ago with one of my papers (a PDF generated using pdflatex) and it didn't work that well: the text was fine but some section titles were off, and all of…
p4bl0 on HNI tried several physics papers and none of them had any equation extracted. Is it by design have problems with LaTeX equations?
NmAmDa on HNYup, this is a known limitation: > What are the limitations? There are several known limitations. Tables are currently extracted from PDFs as images, which are not accessible.…
codeviking on HN
Conversion is slow and gallery loads too many images
From 2 comments
"We're eager to hear what you think, ..." I think I will stick with pdftohtml, pdftotext, and pdfimages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software). These take seconds not…
1vuio0pswjnm7 on HNGreat site, congrats! One comment is that the slowest page to load was the Gallery [0] as it loads an ungodly amount of PNG files from what appears to be a single IP (a GCP…
gregsadetsky on HN
Privacy concerns about uploaded PDFs being retained
From 1 comment
Do you remove the pdf files we send to your servers? Edit https://allenai.org/terms point 5, you own all the uploads! So if by mistake we send a medical PDF for example or…
kahon65 on HN
Requests
Source code or open-source release
From 2 comments
"We're eager to hear what you think, ..." I think I will stick with pdftohtml, pdftotext, and pdfimages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software). These take seconds not…
1vuio0pswjnm7 on HNThis is amazing! Will make my (offline-only) Kindle finally display scientific papers. Took a random link of arxiv and it worked like a charm, including TOC. will this be OS'ed?
chrisMyzel on HN
Print-friendly CSS and fonts
From 1 comment
Great initiative, HTML is the way to go! It would be great if you could add some basic CSS rules for print? Right now navigation elements are needlessly repeated on each page,…
john-doe on HN
EPUB or MOBI export for e-readers
From 1 comment
I'd love to see a way to re-export a paper into a digital-friendly format, say epub/mobi to use on my e-reader. Any plans on that?
znpy on HN
Questions
Will it be open sourced?
From 2 comments
This is amazing! Will make my (offline-only) Kindle finally display scientific papers. Took a random link of arxiv and it worked like a charm, including TOC. will this be OS'ed?
chrisMyzel on HNYay, glad to hear it! If you end up viewing one of these on your Kindle, let us know how well (or not) things work. We're not sure if it's something that we can distribute as OSS…
codeviking on HN
Will it be linked to arXiv or preprint sites?
From 2 comments
Looks great! Have you considered linking this up to something like arxiv or other preprint sites?
isaacimagine on HNYup, we're definitely thinking about this. Our focus right now is on providing a tool folks can run it on whatever papers they have access to. For instance, some researchers…
codeviking on HN
Alternatives named
arxiv-vanity
From 2 comments
There's already this for arXiv: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/ Their job is a little bit easier because arXiv papers have the .tex source available, so you can use one of the…
_delirium on HNYou may check out https://arxiv-vanity.com as well. OS, convertation rates are close to 70% on random arxiv paper if I'm not mistaken, but hardly can be called stable
kartoshechka on HN
pdf2htmlEX
From 1 comment
For non-reflow conversion there is pdf2htmlEX: https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX is discontinued but there is development under https://github.com/pdf2htmlEX/pdf2htmlEX…
Klasiaster on HN
Calibre
From 2 comments
You could give Calibre a try. The result will probably be a long way from perfect for complicated documents but it does work reasonably well for most things. Formulas don't…
kwhitefoot on HNThere is a offline solution if you are looking for, the app is Calibre. It is basically ebook manager & extra. It can convert the PDF into mobi and customizable based on your…
Isthatablackgsd on HN