So I guess the issue here is having a tool which parses and edits PDFs to insert hyperlinks. That’s hard. Even if you solve the lookup problem by going through something like Semantic Scholar (the way I use https://ricon.dev/ on gwern.net for reverse citation search), PDFs aren’t made for this: when you look at a bit of text which is the name of a book or paper, it may not even be text, it may just be an image… Plus, your links will die. You shouldn’t trust any of those sites to stay up long-term at the exact URLs they are at.
About links dying; One way to solve this would be if we used peer-to-peer networks for documents like PDFs. I’m excited about dat protocol for things like this, though it will need more popularity of course.
https://docs.datproject.org/docs/intro
It seems like our current URL system is quite poor in comparison.
PDFs support hyperlinks: they can define anchors at arbitrary points within themselves for a hyperlink, and they can hyperlink out. You can even specify a target page in a PDF which doesn’t define any usable anchors (which is dead useful and I use it all the time in references): eg https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_open_parameters.pdf#page=5
So I guess the issue here is having a tool which parses and edits PDFs to insert hyperlinks. That’s hard. Even if you solve the lookup problem by going through something like Semantic Scholar (the way I use https://ricon.dev/ on gwern.net for reverse citation search), PDFs aren’t made for this: when you look at a bit of text which is the name of a book or paper, it may not even be text, it may just be an image… Plus, your links will die. You shouldn’t trust any of those sites to stay up long-term at the exact URLs they are at.
About links dying; One way to solve this would be if we used peer-to-peer networks for documents like PDFs. I’m excited about dat protocol for things like this, though it will need more popularity of course. https://docs.datproject.org/docs/intro
It seems like our current URL system is quite poor in comparison.