Announcing a new way to read papers.

TLDR; Read ArXiv papers on Semantic Scholar as responsive HTML documents, rather than static, hard to read PDFs.

Researchers at AI2 both read and write a lot of papers, so it’s of no surprise that when walking through our office you’ll regularly see a bunch of screens broadcasting academic literature. What is surprising is that researchers are still consuming these documents as PDFs, static documents that don’t reflow to improve content legibility for the particular device you’re using. This is particularly surprising given the proliferation of devices we all have at our fingertips at any given moment.

Today we’re excited to announce a feature that changes that. Over the last month we partnered with the team behind ArXiv Vanity to bring their technology to Semantic Scholar. Starting today you can read papers published via ArXiv on Semantic Scholar as responsive HTML documents. This means they’ll render correctly whether you’re on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer. The reading experience also includes improvements like consistent formatting from one paper to another, optimal typography for legibility, and the ability to see the full title and author pertaining to a cited paper inline within the document.

Behind the scene’s ArXiv-Vanity uses LatexML to convert the raw LaTeX to it’s HTML representation, after which some post-processing further enhances the output and styles it using the Distill template. We execute this process offline en-masse as to ensure as fast of an experience as possible.

In order to access the new reading experience, look for papers published in ArXiv on Semantic Scholar with the “Read Paper” button. Some ArXiv papers won’t have this button due to to formatting incompatibilities, but the vast majority should be available. If you just want to preview the new experience without searching for a paper, check out this paper.

Keep in mind that this is a first draft, so there’s bound to be a few rendering bugs and other issues. We’re curious to see what people think — and like any prototype if the idea resonates we’re planning on further investing in it. Here’s a few things we’re thinking about adding in the future:

• The ability to highlight passages (and see what others are highlighting).
• The ability to comment inline within a document, and collaborate with a small group in doing so.
• The ability to share a link that takes a user to the exact line / figure / citation in a document that you’d like them to see.

That’s all for now. Happy reading, and if you’re excited about this feature or have ideas about what we can add to it, don’t be afraid to drop me a line at sams@allenai.org.