Two columns is good, albeit annoying on mobile. But the font. The typeface kills me, and almost every LaTeX-generated document sports it.
:root, [data-theme=light] {
/* --text-font-family: "freight-sans-pro";
}
> "Computer Modern" is used for body text to give it a professional/academic look
arXiv accepts various flavors of TeX, or PDFs not produced by TeX [0], and automatically produces PDFs and HTML where possible (e.g. if TeX is submitted). In the case of the example paper under discussion, the authors submitted TeX with PDF figures [1], and the PDF version of the paper was produced by arXiv. The formatting was mainly set by using REVTeX, which is a set of macros for LaTeX intended for American Physical Society journals.
[0] https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html#formats-for-te... [1] https://arxiv.org/format/2312.12451
Some fields may use Word files, but in most of physics you would get laughed at...
It is true that most journals will typically reformat your .tex in a different way than is displayed on the arXiv.
In the arxiv you use latex and do everything yourself. There is no editor.
The extra column next to the one I'm reading introduces a lot of visual noise, and the content is hard enough as it is. I'm sure physicists have all gotten used to it, but it certainly trips me up.
Papers are generally not read start to finish in one go: there's lots of rereading and jumping back and forth between key parts, and anything that moves them further apart makes this harder.
I still think a flexible layout is best. If you like multi-columns and have a wide screen, why not display 12 columns next to each other?
With PDF this is not possible. With HTML the content can in principle be sliced and diced how you like it.
But HTML is so much more flexible, and ideally people can choose how they want it, although at this point it seems that's not (yet) implemented.
I find jumping back and forth is always a pain on computer screens and ebooks by the way, and is the major reason I much prefer print for this type of thing.
While it looks perfectly fine on a phone. Two columns layout looks terrible on a smartphone, the text is too tiny to read comfortably.
It would probably be even better if you can flip it left and right like a ebook instead of scrolling to allocate the content faster. But current design is good enough IMO. (Compare to reading a pdf on cellphone)
I cannot find anything relevant in any of the 3 browsers I use (Vivialdi, Firefox, Chrome). Would really appreciate this option.
A quick search gave some apparently unmaintained browser extensions, and it's it.
(For reference: I am at the end of Gen X, people 3-4 years younger than me are considered Millennials).
I do not much care what font the auctor finds pleasant to read, but what I find pleasant to read, and this font isn't it, and neither are the colors.
Defaults and UX rule the world. It’s unfortunate that $subj wasn’t a thing for so long and probably scared millions of curious minds from material. It is so important.