Posted by FailMore 1 day ago
We have responsive and open standards like HTML and EPUB (zipped XTML) and they work great. arXiv has HTML papers, and libgen and anna's archive often have EPUB versions of books. The issue for me with EPUB is the lack of good readers now.
Sure, I would like that beautifully designed page to magically become a single column beautiful document on my phone, but I will take the former over a badly designed text extract where the relevant figure is 10 pages away.
Epub (=html) is good for novels, but there is nothing replacing PDF for science papers. If anything, the latex (or ideally typst) source would come the closest, if properly written (not absolute offsets). That could be used to produce different page sized versions.
I months into building a pasteboard transform library that normalises VS Code, Google Docs, PDFs and a bunch of Chromium apps provider-specific data so I can start pasting everything everywhere exactly how I want it. It's much, much messier than I expected.
Apps put different UTTypes on the pasteboard that are not really compatible with each other. Usually there's a plain text fallback, then rich text/HTML, then provider-specific data. You show how much insane work is needed just to make text selectable with glyph mappings, layout, links, code blocks, rendered styles, etc. But once you copy from that PDF, most viewers still only expose raw text, and often broken raw text at that...
It’s on of the few examples when converting it in to picture and chucking it in a multimodal llm is a more sensible solution than trying to parse it.
In my experience it's the NON software engineers who tend to underestimate the complexity