Xivly
A calm, open-source reader for research papers
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This is 1 of 89 launches in academic writing and research tools — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →
82 other launches read as similar to this one →
Details
- External ID
- 1276299
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- Xivly
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- Oct. 13, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 1
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.33
- Tags
- Productivity, Open Source, Education, GitHub
Description
Xivly is a calm reader for research papers. Hover a citation, figure, table or equation to preview it instead of jumping around. Highlight, draw and write on the page: notes are saved as standard annotations inside the PDF, so they open in any PDF app. Add papers from an arXiv link or a Hugging Face search, with code links filled in. Your library is a plain folder. Free, open source, no account. Mac, Windows, Linux, web and Chrome.
Enrichment
- Niche
- academic writing and research tools
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Workflow automation
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- open-source document reader for academic papers
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Building a standard PDF viewer is easy, but parsing scientific PDF internal layout structures to dynamically hover-preview citations, figures, tables, and equations requires complex document parsing.
What it would actually take: Building this requires a PDF rendering canvas (PDF.js) combined with ML/heuristic document layout analysis (e.g., Nougat, Grobid, or customized PDF object stream parsers) to map bibliographic citations, figure labels, and math environments to exact bounding boxes and internal references. Annotations must be serialized back into native PDF annotation dictionaries according to the ISO 32000 PDF specification.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 82 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #38 of 83 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 334 days after the earliest competitor.
- Journly · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- I built Goodreads for academic papers to help my wife survive her PhD · hn · 2026-01-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Glyph, a local-first Markdown notes app for macOS built with Rust · hn · 2026-03-04 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- PDF reader with interactive visualizations for research papers · hn · 2026-02-27 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Unleaf · ph · 2026-09-29 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- InklyResearch · ph · 2026-10-04 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- PDFLY · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Canto: Private Reading Journal · ph · 2026-09-17 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.