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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

I like the approach and it looks cool, but you might struggle with the target market here.

Most people reading technical papers care absolutely zero about the animations in between the diagrams and figures.

For example, the Bitcoin whitepaper animations probably bring no value, and I personally would prefer to rather read the PDF version of that.

With that in mind, you may still be on to something, but I suspect there needs to be another value proposition here that perhaps you haven't identified yet.

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I strongly disagree. I like reading technical papers but I'm not smart enough for them. I'd draw lots of sketches for math class, architecture, algorithms. I've actually been running technical papers through GPT-3 to try to simplify parts before reading them.

I heavily disagree with this. I went through the example papers on the website and found that the animations made a huge positive impact on my experience. While people who prefer non-animated versions of papers can read them already, something like this could help a lot of people who generally may get bored or have an aversion to reading long static text.

If in your paper you are going to try and explain abstract concepts in words and expect the reader to visualise things in their head, why not make it easier by dynamically rendering it out alongside the paper?

I think this is a very cool innovation in an area that is pretty old (research papers), and something that with a proper go-to-market strategy could end up having wide adoption.

That is because the target market usually shuns technical papers, because the tool didnt exist previously.

This is for the Projectlead who sends you links to papers, to do "research" for him and wants it visualized in a presentation.

Now he does not need you to be his eyes and explaining things in layman terms. Actually i could see this standardized and partially auto-generated for math-papers.

I do not think this is possible to do in LaTeX, which is typically used in science and math papers.

and thus will reinvent the wheel - instead of simply including executable javascript into the pdf

All things become browsers given enough time..

I'm a bit more positive: it might help to engage less technical readers, a bit like the popular science magazines. It does depend on how good your text and animations are, though: it takes a lot of time and effort to communicate in this style to laymen, which would make this service very niche.

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