Arxiv PDF Previewer in Discord

Installation

Get a token from https://discord.com/developers/applications and run export DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN="YOUR_TOKEN_HERE"

pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py

Then add the bot to your Discord group

Bot invitation

Just invite PDF Preview # 2277 to your channel. This bot is running on a cheap Heroku instance, depending on traffic I might scale it.

Usage

1. @PDF Preview https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.03837.pdf -> will render the first page of the PDF
2. @PDF Preview https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.03837.pdf#page=3 -> will render the third page of the PDF
3. @PDF Preview https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03837 -> Will find the corresponding pdf and render it

Known issues

1. Some pdfs online don't have a .pdf extension, this won't quite work for those websites but it will work for arxiv
2. I'm not sure why but if you try to preview the same link multiple times in a row it won't render, I suspect it's some caching or anti-spam feature Discord has
3. The heroku deployment is still somewhat flaky
4. We need better logs in general, debugging things has been a pain