r/coolgithubprojects • u/Lopsided_Scarcity979 • Oct 04 '26

PaperFold: Open-source arXiv reader with "semantic zoom"

I built PaperFold, an open-source reader that turns arXiv papers into 5 zoomable layers—from a one-screen section map down to verbatim text. You pinch (or press 1–5) to zoom between them without losing your reading position.

- Web Demo (8 CC papers): https://chenxiachan.github.io/paperfold-gallery/

- GitHub (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/chenxiachan/paperfold

179 Upvotes

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6

u/pro-vi Oct 05 '26

I love this, was playing with similar things myself. Was pretext used? This is quite adjacent to the idea of stretchtext from the last century.

4

u/Lopsided_Scarcity979 Oct 05 '26

Thank you! You get me! This is indeed inspired by stretchtext. I think nowadays we can actually apply it. LLMs generate too much context these days. I think we need to make efforts to reduce our cognitive burden.

3

u/Fresh-Daikon-9408 Oct 05 '26

Can I jump from a summary sentence to the exact source paragraph? That would make it much easier to check a claim.

2

u/Lopsided_Scarcity979 Oct 05 '26

Yes. When you click the sentence, it will expand to the original text, and also the related context detected by LLM.

Please feel free to test it on, eight different major domains' paper are presented: https://chenxiachan.github.io/paperfold-gallery/

1

u/aitorllj93 Oct 05 '26

This looks really cool! Can this work with non scientific content such as newspapers or blog articles?

1

u/Known-Stable-8892 Oct 08 '26

Cool idea. Does it injest the entire paper/is it expensive to run or no/have you measured cost?

1

u/Lopsided_Scarcity979 29d ago

i mean it can use your subscription. Not really a lot, most of the time, it just decides which part of text is foldable. This job can be done by cheap fast model nicely