search

dginev / ar5iv

A web service offering HTML5 articles from arXiv.org as converted with latexml
https://ar5iv.org
MIT License
783 stars 20 forks source link

Consider having an "export to kindle" option #56

Open Chechgm opened 2 years ago

Chechgm commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the fantastic tool! My dream is to read scientific papers on my kindle, but most of the tools out there render papers very poorly. Yours is working well most of the time. Please consider having an export to some e-reader format.

dginev commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion! Here are some early thoughts:

I like the general idea of having an ebook export for arXiv. We have an early variant of that possible with latexml, which has experimental support for emitting the epub format.

Kindle does quite well with that, especially if they update their MathML support some time this year.

That said, making sure we generate ebooks of high quality would take some focused development and QA testing, so it is not something to embark on lightly. At present it also implies converting the entire article set twice, which we should optimize away - we should be able to emit both HTML and epub during the same conversion pass.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like such advanced features to get a blessing from arXiv, and ideally be initiated by/coordinated with their team. So I will definitely check with them before starting anything ebook-related.

TheSeriousProgrammer commented 1 year ago

To add an update to the same I was able to achieve some pretty good results through the following process

Most e-readers like the one I possess doesnt support rendering mathematical functions, so all mathfunctions should be converted to images for successfull viewing in epub

Open the respective ar5iv link in your browser and save a local copy of the same. In my case I took the famous "Attention is All you need" paper. Then I performed the following commands

In this process some minor styling properties like page border are lost, but the results are satisfactory enough I can now happily read research papers from my kindle

Github didnt allow uploading a epub file , the below zip file contains the epub generated with the above steps attention_gladtex.zip

dginev commented 1 year ago

Most e-readers like the one I possess doesnt support rendering mathematical functions, so all mathfunctions should be converted to images for successfull viewing in epub

Another constructive reason for me to wait a bit more on this issue is that there is now an expectation for this state of affairs to change soon.

MathML is a part of EPUB 3. Since MathML support has just recently returned to Chrome 109, I would expect that to cascade into all Blink-based EPUB readers in the near future.