Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode • Hacker News Board

I remember they had something similar 15 years ago. It was called tagged PDFs. It was useful on low resolution devices like PocketPC as the full page view wasn't readable. You had to convert your PDFs before loading them onto the device. Probably went out of favour when the iPhone came along and screen resolution increased. Looks like it’s an upgraded version of this with added ML.

Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode

#16

Post by markonen » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

A better title would be an ”ambitious multi-year vision for Adobe Reader” as this isn’t changing the PDF format at all: it is simply a new, buzzword-compliant (AI! ML!) content-reflowing UI for the reader app.

Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode

#17

Post by justinzollars » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

xwdv wrote: post #11

Adobe is a great company to invest in.

Objectively true. Adobe makes a lot of cash.

Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode

#18

Post by ilaksh » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

It sounds like it will make viewing papers and such that are PDFs much more convenient, eventually.

But it really makes you question the idea of putting things into PDF format in the first place.

Because at this point it may be that a significant majority of the time PDFs are read on screens.

So in my opinion it might make more sense for acedemic journals (for example) to standardize on a something like reStructuredText (which now supports LaTeX by default). Or maybe Markdown, or a subset of HTML.

Or maybe a standard eReader (Kindle-like) format.

Or just default to a tar.gz with the RST and supporting files in standard folders.

Then if they want to publish a print journal they can automatically format it for printing. If it doesn't look good enough sometimes then let the print journals use AI or manually typeset it (earn their money).

So anyway I wish Chrome and Firefox would get support for my new RST archive format.

Point being that PDF is getting a little obsolete.

Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode

#19

Post by flareback » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

FandangoRanger wrote: post #14

Coming soon: PDF will become Flash!

Please don't even joke about that.

Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode

#20

Post by orf » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

Imagine creating a document format so broken you need to build an artificial intelligence product to display it on smaller screens.