dginev

You will spot many (many) issues with our current coverage and fidelity of the paper rendering. When they jump at you, please report them to us. All reports from the last 2 years have landed on github. We have made a bit of progress since, but there are (a lot of) more low-hanging fruit to pick.

Project issues:

https://github.com/arXiv/html_feedback/issues/

The main bottleneck at the moment is developer time. And the main vehicle for improvements on the LaTeX side of things continues to be LaTeXML. Happy to field any questions.

Comment · 11 months ago

Just passing by to mention that if you get excited about seeing your upgrades in arXiv itself, we can talk about contributing them to the arXiv HTML pages.

But seeing your plans for Science Stack, all the best with the endeavour!

And I am curious to know if arXiv:2105.10386 works well.

Comment · 1 year ago

Sure, the repository is open source (linked from the front page).

The selection did not get much thought at all, just a Rust rand shuffle over all ids performed at first page visit and then cached: https://docs.rs/rand/latest/rand/seq/trait.SliceRandom.html#...

I had all IDs already computed for the previous/next article navigation feature, so it seemed fun to reuse them.

Comment · 1 year ago

One can also grab a random arXiv paper in HTML (via ar5iv), if that was desired.

Just visit:

https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/feeling_lucky

Comment · 2 years ago

If you are already using LaTeXML, it is also easy to get the ar5iv rendering (example article: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1910.06709)

You can either copy the CSS asset from: https://github.com/dginev/ar5iv-css

and add "--css=ar5iv.css --nodefaultresources" to the command line options for latexmlpost (or latexmlc).

Or alternatively, for people not interested in learning how to install and configure latexml, they can try the self-contained Dockerfile at:

https://github.com/dginev/ar5ivist/

Comment · 2 years ago

Right, that's LaTeXML - it tries to emulate as much as possible of the TeX typesetting system, while retaining enough control to emit structured markup.

Which also allows us (and generally all contributors of latexml package support) to conveniently maintain various parallel data structures and metadata needed along the way.

Modern HTML is very often helpful to produce higher quality article renderings. Examples:

1. we recently started using flexbox for subfigures, allowing them to reflow.

2. we have started emitting ARIA accessibility annotations (there is now an "alt" key for \includegraphics)

3. MathML Core allowed us to have native web rendering for math expressions in every browser.

As to LaTeX rendering in the browser, there are various other projects out there you could look up with partial support. For latexml the WebAssembly route seems most realistic, as we are undergoing a rewrite in Rust. But there are quite a number of pieces to flesh out before we get there.

Comment · 2 years ago

To me one of the exciting aspects of HTML is that we can theme the same article in different ways, tailored to individual preferences - just swap in a different CSS file.

Having a two-column theme, or left-aligned vs justified themes, could be workable in the long run. I hope that we get to see some browser extensions modding the pages before too long.

The reason for the current justified text is that it is the default aesthetic for a LaTeX-based article, and a lot of authors expect it.

Comment · 2 years ago

That's it in spirit, but in practice it's refreshed:

https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-view-as-html

Comment · 2 years ago

For the image widths, there is some CSS fine-tuning that is still needed on the arXiv HTML side. I think that will get fixed soon, just needs the right height directive set.

Getting subfigures emulated via flexbox is one of our more recent LaTeXML enhancements, and still has some ongoing work (working on it today actually). It can be a bit finicky to test - there are easily 20 different ways people can write LaTeX for subfigures in arXiv.

Comment · 2 years ago

Thanks for the kind words, but some corrections:

1. My name is Deyan (hi!)

2. ar5iv was the latest frontend incarnation, but our actual work on converting LaTeX to HTML goes back nearly 20 years behind the scenes.

3. I was an undergraduate student when I was introduced to the project back in 2007. It was started "in spirit" by 3 senior co-conspirators back then: Michael Kohlhase, Bruce Miller and Robert Miner. And I am by no means a solitary actor today, even if I may be the chief online presence of the people involved. Bruce is doing the bulk of the hard work on LaTeXML to this day.

I documented some of the history in an invited talk for CICM 2022, which you can find on youtube, or see the slides at:

https://prodg.org/talks/welcome_to_ar5iv

It's really great that the HTML has now reached "home base" in arXiv, and I hope their team gets a lot more of the positive attention going forward - today's achievement is entirely theirs!

Comment · 2 years ago

Wrong, arXiv was first. Check this HTML paper from 1997:

https://arxiv.org/html/astro-ph/9708066