Comment on Publishers Always Innovating
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 21 hours agoI love that PDFs are so difficult to transform into HTML, too
FYI, if that’s relevant to your field, every new article published on arxiv.org now has a HTML render as well.
And on many older publications, transforming “arxiv.org” into “ar5iv.org” leads to an HTML rendering that is a best-effort experiments they ran for a while.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 20 hours ago
That’s really cool! What I really would like is a tool that converts PDFs to semantic HTML files. I took a peek there and it seems easier for them because they have the original LeX source.
I think for arbitrary PDFs files the information just isn’t there. I’ve looked into it a bit and it’s sort of all over. A tool called pdf2htmlex is pretty good but it makes the HTML look exactly like the PDF.
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 20 hours ago
Yes, PDFs are much more permissive and may not have any semantic information at all. Hell, some old publications are just scanned images!
PDF -> semantic seems to be a hard problem that basically requires OCR, like these people are doing
JackbyDev@programming.dev 16 hours ago
Oh nice, thanks for sharing that project. I haven’t heard of it before!