Tell us what you would need described in a tutorial to be productive, as well as your background with the technologies involved (TeX/LaTeX, perl, XML, XSLT, HTML). Probably best as a new issue:
ar5iv tracks the arXiv collection with a one month lag. Exactly as to signal that this is not the "official" arXiv rendering. It is also a showcase predating the arXiv /html/ route, but largely using the same technology. Nowadays maintained by the same people (hi!)
There used to be another showcase, called arxiv-vanity. They captured what happened pretty well with their farewell post on their homepage:
You can help make LaTeXML better, or you can simply report issues when you spot them during reading. Some we have collected automatically (any errors and missing packages), but others we can't - wrong colors, broken aspect ratios of figures, weirdly layed out author lists, etc.
As a very brief update - we are pending a larger update.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
You can think of both arxiv-vanity and ar5iv as the "alpha" experiments that lead into the official arXiv "beta" HTML announced today.
Once a few rounds of feedback and improvements are integrated, and the full collection of articles acquires HTML in the main arXiv site, ar5iv will be decommissioned.
The plan is to turn all existing ar5iv links into redirects to the official HTML, and free up the resources for maintaining it. I am not sure what are the plans for maintaining arxiv-vanity, but I suspect they may head down a similar path some time later.
Can confirm. From an ar5iv standpoint, 2.56% articles currently fail to convert entirely, and 22.9% have known errors to the converter. That leaves 74.5% of nominally usable articles. This success rate is noticeably lower for the newest batches of arXiv submissions, as the converter hasn't caught up with the most recent package innovations.
We have a plan in place to meaningfully fall back for unknown packages, but that will take at least another year to put in place, and likely another couple of years to stabilize.
Meanwhile, there is some hope that with arXiv launching the HTML Beta we will get more contributions for package support (LaTeXML is an open source project, with public domain licensing, everybody benefits).
But again the original point is spot on. Coverage will be hit-or-miss for a while longer yet, for an arbitrary arXiv submission. The good news is that authors could work towards better support for their articles, if they wanted to.
https://github.com/brucemiller/LaTeXML/issues
It's a pretty deep rabbit hole, but I wholeheartedly agree most standard package support incantations should be easy and few to use.