mkremins / blogify

Turn academic papers into blog posts, kinda

blogify

Academic papers are basically just blog posts. But we publish them as ugly PDFs that are awkward to read (especially on a mobile device) and lack basic affordances we've come to expect from the web. So no one actually reads them.

But what if we could automagically transform an academic paper into a web page that looks and feels just like any other blog post? Then we could trick people into reading all kinds of stuff.

blogify does this! It's an experimental and incredibly janky script that can transform certain "well-formed" LaTeX and BibTeX source files into nice clean HTML pages, complete with some basic mobile-friendly CSS and a few other conveniences.

Internally, it's a bit of a nightmare. There is nothing resembling a proper LaTeX parser here – just a bunch of ad-hoc regular expressions, which seem to mostly work on the incredibly restricted subset of LaTeX that I and my three most frequent collaborators happened to use in the handful of papers I tested it on.

I seriously doubt this script will work for you out of the box. In fact, it barely even works for me – half the papers I run through it come out with some minor errors that I need to patch up by hand. But I'm putting it up here on the off chance that someone might find it useful.

example outputs

• https://mkremins.github.io/publications/CozyMysteryConstructionKit
• https://mkremins.github.io/publications/EvaluatingViaRetellings
• https://mkremins.github.io/publications/Felt_SimpleStorySifter
• https://mkremins.github.io/publications/GenerativeGames_StorytellingPartners
• https://mkremins.github.io/publications/GeneratorsThatRead

how use it

First, cd into the directory containing all your LaTeX (and other) source files.

Create a new file in this directory called pubinfo.json. This file should look something like the following example:

{
  "name": "EvaluatingViaRetellings",
  "title": "Evaluating AI-Based Games Through Retellings",
  "authors": [
    {"name": "Max Kreminski", "url": "https://mkremins.github.io"},
    {"name": "Ben Samuel"},
    {"name": "Edward Melcer"},
    {"name": "Noah Wardrip-Fruin"}
  ],
  "venue": "AIIDE",
  "venueLink": "https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~gmsmith/aiide2019/",
  "year": 2019,
  "month": 10,
  "bibtex": {
    "type": "inproceedings",
    "title": "Evaluating {AI}-based games through retellings",
    "author": "Kreminski, Max and Samuel, Ben and Melcer, Edward and Wardrip-Fruin, Noah",
    "booktitle": "Fifteenth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference"
  }
}

Then invoke the blogify.js script via node, passing in the path to your "main" LaTeX file – the one that requires all your other source files.

node path/to/blogify.js mainLatexFile.tex

If all goes well, the script will spit out an index.html file in the same directory. This is your blogified paper!

why not do this correctly

Before I wrote this script, I tried a bunch of the LaTeX-to-HTML conversion thingies that already exist. As far as I can tell, none of them actually do the thing I want them to do. This is probably my own fault somehow; I am not good with computer.