Reading a paper
Open arXiv papers and PDFs, navigate sections, and adjust the view.
The Reader is where you'll spend most of your time. It loads any arXiv paper or PDF, extracts sections automatically, and stays in sync with the chat panel.
Opening a paper
There are three ways in:
- Paste an arXiv ID or public URL on the home page or in the address bar. Both
2503.01234,https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01234or any publicly accessible PDF url. - Search from the home page using keyword, natural-language, or hybrid mode (see Search).
- Pick a trending paper from the home feed.
You might occasionally face issues with a public URL requiring auth tokens. In that case, download the PDF onto your computer and then upload it.
Heads up: large or scanned PDFs may take a few seconds to OCR the first time. We cache the extracted text so subsequent opens are instant - you can follow the progress using the indexing progress bar at the bottom of the reader page.
Adjusting the view
Above the paper, you'll find:
- Text size: bump fonts up or down for comfortable reading
- View mode: switch between rendered text and the original PDF
- Collapse panels: hide either side for a wider reading column
References inside the paper are clickable when we can resolve them. Clicking citations like [12] or (Vaswani et al., 2017) navigate to the papers references section and if the paper has a arXiv id you can directly click on that to open the paper in a new tab.
Listen to a paper
Click Listen in the top right of the Reader to generate an audio narration of the paper. We strip references, equations, and tables for a cleaner listen, then stream the audio with a player you can pause/resume.
For the best experience we ask you to keep the reader tab open while the audio is being generated.
The first generation can take between 5-20 minutes; after that, the narration is cached. Only first time generations count towards your quota use.
Continue reading
When you come back, the home page shows a Continue reading row with papers you had open recently, so you don't have to fish for that URL again. Clicking on the paper on Homepage opens it in the reader page and auto-scrolls to the last page you were reading.
Tips
- Drag-resize the middle and right panels by grabbing the dividers
- Hold Shift while selecting text to extend the current selection
- Citations and equations render via KaTeX, so you can copy-paste them as LaTeX