Reading a paper with its source page beside the answer

Description and use

Paper Margins provides quick, source‑verified explanations of selected passages in research papers, displaying the model’s answer alongside the extracted text and citation previews.

Problem

Researchers often pause on dense paragraphs and need quick explanations while still seeing the supporting sentence and page.

Outcome

Paper Margins enables quick, source-verified explanations of selected passages in research papers, improving comprehension while maintaining traceability to the original text.

Workflow

• Open a local PDF or enter an arXiv ID in the reader.
• Select a passage in the rendered page.
• Choose "Explain" or "Translate" to send the passage and nearby text to the model.
• View the model response in the right margin with separate excerpts of the extracted text.
• Click an excerpt to navigate back to the page.
• Optionally ask a question, summarize the section, or request a short paper summary.
• Use the reference preview to resolve citations to arXiv or DOI records.

Evidence

I built Paper Margins as a small local reader for that moment.

Source

The reader opens a local PDF or an arXiv ID.

Source

I can select a passage in the rendered page and choose Explain or Translate.

Source

The right margin shows the model response and the extracted page text used for that request.

Source

PDF.js renders the pages in the browser and extracts their text on the local Node server.

Source

Ollama is the default model connection.

Source

This is a reader for one paper at a time.

Source