interactive textbook summaries

paperchat

Drop a textbook PDF, get a navigable interactive chapter site — page-by-page concept fragments with web-component figures, KaTeX-rendered math, and walk-through explanations you can click through.

Live demo

One chapter, generated end-to-end by GLM‑5.1 via OpenRouter, for < $0.55.

Materials Science · Callister & Rethwish · Ch. 3

The Structure of Crystalline Solids

9 sections · 44 PDF pages · interactive 3D unit cells, draggable Bragg's law, click-through Miller indices

What's inside each chapter

Interactive figuresClick, drag, slide. Each concept gets a manipulable diagram instead of a static one.
3D visualizationsUnit cells, orbitals, lattices — rotate them yourself with Three.js.
Click-to-defineHover any technical term to read its definition without losing your place.
Source-anchoredEvery section cites the source pages so you can verify against the textbook.
Math-nativeKaTeX rendering with clickable symbol legends in equations.
Self-test decksAnki-style flashcards at the end of every section.

How it works

paperchat runs a planner-then-subagents agent loop. The planner reads the chapter, vets the embedded figures, writes a section plan, and dispatches one writer subagent per concept page. Each writer produces a self-contained HTML fragment with interactive figures from a small web-component library (pc-3d, pc-equation, pc-stepped, pc-anki, …). Output is plain HTML — no framework, no build step.

The local dev server is node dev-server.mjs; the agent loop runs in a detached child process so file edits don't kill in-flight chapter generation.

Run it yourself

git clone https://github.com/eitanporat/paperchat
cd paperchat
npm install
npm run dev   # opens http://localhost:5173

Drop a PDF, pick a model (OpenRouter or Anthropic), click Summarize. The chapter HTML lands in cc-workdir/chapter-<id>/ and can be served as-is — that's what's hosted here.