Xiao Cha Xing originated early from the Wai Fei Temple
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arXiv is a must-have website for almost every researcher, but it's almost 31 years old.
Born in 1991, arXiv' website typography seems to be somewhat out of step with this era.
Especially in today's mobile network popularization, scientific research literature generally uses two columns of typesetting, and it is impossible to read PDFs without enlarging on mobile phones.
Although there are also pages like arXiv-vanity, do you see that the following typography does not spike in blood pressure?
In order to make your research more efficient, a programmer recently developed an ar5iv website that replaced the X in arXiv with 5, the HTML5 version of arXiv.
It is capable of displaying papers in modern HTML5 format. Let's first look at the display:
The LaTeX formula is displayed exactly.
Let's take a look at how the mobile version works:
Even on narrow phone pages, the browsing experience remains good, and you can call the phone's own translation dictionary. Do you dare to say that you don't have time to read the literature in the future? （doge）
According to the developer Deyan Ginev, ar5iv has included 1.75 million papers, accounting for about 97% of the total number of arXiv.
AR5iv features
Ar5iv is very simple to use, as long as you change the X in arXiv in the URL to 5 and then enter, the page can be automatically jumped.
Usually, it only takes a second or two for the web version of the paper to flash in front of you:
Like the arXiv-vanity typographical mess at the beginning, ar5iv simply doesn't exist:
When adjusting the browser width, the formula layout is still not messy:
And ar5iv also supports right-click copying formulas in LaTeX code:
Compared to the humble arXiv-vanity, ar5iv has the following characteristics:
Optimized for large-screen displays, especially for Firefox;
Support mobile browser;
Text alignment with hyphens;
Support light/dark mode switching;
……
Deyan Geniv, who developed ar5iv, believes that the public needs a convenient web page TeX/LaTeX layout.
Currently a PhD student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, he is working on LaTeXML, which is a tool for converting LaTeX into XML and HTML.
In fact, as early as more than a decade ago, some people have studied converting arXiv to LaTeX, and with the development of NLP technology, the accuracy of this conversion has also been significantly improved.
As one of the contributors to the open source project LaTeXML, Geniv developed ar5iv.
Netizens develop one-click conversion plugins
Looking at this wave of operations, the researchers were really shown, and they had a heated discussion with the author on Twitter and offered suggestions.
Some of them went a step further, wondering if they could come up with a browser plugin to simplify the steps of using ar5iv.
Has the brother considered a plug-in to switch the format with one click without manually changing the letter?
I didn't expect that there were really enthusiastic netizens who made one.
Just download a plugin library in GitHub (link at the end of the article), or go directly to the Chrome app store to download withAr5iv.
So that the next time you open the paper, you can convert the format with one click, and then click on it to convert back to the original format:
However, some netizens have noticed some of the current shortcomings of ar5iv.
One of the more reflected problems is that for papers with multiple revisions, ar5iv only supports displaying the v1 version of the paper:
Only the v1 version is displayed when converting papers, but the latest version is displayed when clicking "PDF" on arXiv.
The author has collected all these comments and expressed his hope to work with arXiv to solve the problem of the latest edition in the future.
Browser plugins:
https://github.com/yobibyte/ar5iv_chrome_ext
Reference Links:
[1]https://ar5iv.org/
[2]https://twitter.com/dginev/status/1488157927001268231
[3]https://kwarc.info/people/dginev/