PDF reader with interactive visualizations for research papers
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Hey HN,I built a PDF reader that can generate interactive visualizations right inside the document. The goal is to reduce the “intuition gap” when reading dense papers: select a concept, click Visualize, and it tries to produce a solid visual interactive app where you can rotate/zoom/step through (not just a text explanation).Upload any PDF, select text, click Visualize. Demo (no signup): https://zerodistract.com/try/pdf/67cdee74-810b-4f1b-af7d-010...Product link: https://zerodistract.comI’d love feedback, especially on what feels useful vs. distracting, and where it breaks.
HN · launched Feb 27, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 56%) · 0 views
Niche: academic writing and research tools · 139 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- Analytics & BI
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 139 launches in academic writing and research tools →
Could you build this?
Partial While an LLM can generate code for animations inside a PDF viewer wrapper (PDF.js), generating functional, accurate, sandbox-executed interactive scientific widgets on demand for arbitrary mathematical concepts in research papers requires a sophisticated prompt/validation loop and runtime sandbox.
What it would actually take: The application needs a web PDF viewer (e.g., PDF.js) integrated with text selection and layout coordinates, backed by an LLM agent that receives selected context, mathematical formulas, and figures. The agent must generate valid, self-contained HTML/Canvas/Three.js code that runs in an isolated iframe or web worker sandbox, with automated self-healing for syntax/rendering runtime errors. Ensuring accurate mathematical modeling from dense academic text requires careful prompt engineering, symbolic validation, and frontend sandboxing expertise.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Feature requests: annotation tools
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 883 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #301 of 884 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 119 days after the earliest competitor.
- Interactive research papers (a big step up from ArXiv HTML) · hn · 2025-11-20 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- pdf-to-interactive-web · github · 2026-10-22 · 54 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Accurate PDF Narration · ph · 2026-09-27 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- PDF Editor · ph · 2026-10-24 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- PDF Editor & Scanner Pro · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- papilot · github · 2026-10-26 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Paper Leaf · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
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