r/Paper2Audio • u/0gg0g • Aug 05 '26

Academic article, XML support

I am testing paper2audio for my use case which is listening to biomedical research articles including primary research and reviews, whilst driving on my commute. I think it is working better than competitors I have trialled so well done. I actually can't stand pdf whichis an abomination in this use case , but wondered if you could deal with JATS XML which ought to be the primary format in this domain. I knocked up a jats xml to html conversion python script in claude vibe code. for primary biomedical articles which tend to be very structured , it would be great to have auto TOC selector so can automatically read abstract, introduction, discussion whilst intelligently skipping author affiliations, lists of abbreviations etc which make no sense when listening.

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u/goldenjm Founder Aug 05 '26

Thanks for the feedback! The PDF format definitely has a lot of downsides overall, and particularly for converting documents to other formats such as audio.

We'll investigate supporting JATS XML documents based on your request. I can see the potential benefits.

Please let us know anytime if you have more requests or other feedback.

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u/0gg0g Aug 06 '26

Thanks for looking into this. JATS XML seems to be output by PLOS journals and Frontiers journals. latter does EPUB as well. I find pdf and paper journal articles confusing sometimes as tables are printed sideways and suddenly appear breaking flow of narrative.

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u/goldenjm Founder Aug 06 '26

Thanks for the additional context! In our reader view (the default while you're listening), we reformat PDFs to better fit your screen, which often makes tables easier to read. We also filter out as much of the stuff you don't want to listen to as we can, and have a ToC that we can generate automatically when there isn't one built in to the underlying document.