"Used AI and ML", Christ, we need AI and ML to read a static document now.
I'm guessing OCR of scanned images to turn into text.
Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
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Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#32Isn't the whole point of PDFs that they (mostly) don't change? They represent content as laid out on a page. So, IMO this is neat if it's new tech for reading PDFs and extracting data from them (and maybe leveraging current under-used features to store more machine-readable information), but bad if it's about introducing even more complexity into the PDF documents. Perhaps 10 years from now we will have responsive PD…
This is more like a readability mode than a responsive website. It's a button you click to automatically make a fixed-layout PDF fluid and easier to read on mobile. You'd still author the document the same way without considering multiple device sizes. When the PDF needs to be reproduced faithfully (printing) it would still appear as the creator intended.
For many, the point of a PDF is that it appears the same way in all contexts. For device-dependent rendering, we have HTML.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Christ, we need AI and ML to read a static document now The article doesn't say that. This is like Reader Mode in your browser. It presents the same content in a different way based on an understanding of the document structure. You don't need to use it.
If you want content to be able to be presented in different ways (such as a Reader Mode) that reflect the document structure, there are far better options than PDF. This is Adobe trying to extend their moat. Just Say No.
You may as well be saying that there are better options for producing readable text than HTML, because that's what Reader Mode is for. Yes, but entirely irrelevant. Reader Mode is for the reader to use, not for the writer to use. Liquid Mode is for the reader to use, not for the writer to use. See the parallel?
What the writer wants to present is structured layout based on design. Sometimes that's what the reader wants to see, other times not. That's why websites aren't all flat text and browsers have reader modes, not the other way around.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is more like a readability mode than a responsive website. It's a button you click to automatically make a fixed-layout PDF fluid and easier to read on mobile. You'd still author the document the same way without considering multiple device sizes. When the PDF needs to be reproduced faithfully (printing) it would still appear as the creator intended.
For many, the point of a PDF is that it appears the same way in all contexts. For device-dependent rendering, we have HTML.
Sadly no one really publishes books as HTML.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#35This sounds like a vision for Adobe Reader, not PDF.
Where are the changes to the PDF format that will help other viewers understand hierarchy and relayout pages without Adobe's ML engine?
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#36I 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.
Tagged pdfs are still a thing for accessibility, to make pdfs work better with assistive technology. In practice, this is underutilized, because of the additional effort to use it properly.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#37This is feature brought back from the past. Back a decade ago, I had reflow mode on my Pocket PC and I used it to read PDF during my commute.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is more like a readability mode than a responsive website. It's a button you click to automatically make a fixed-layout PDF fluid and easier to read on mobile. You'd still author the document the same way without considering multiple device sizes. When the PDF needs to be reproduced faithfully (printing) it would still appear as the creator intended.
For many, the point of a PDF is that it appears the same way in all contexts. For device-dependent rendering, we have HTML.
> For device-dependent rendering, we have HTML.
It does not sound like the goal is device-dependent rendering, though. This is exactly parallel to Reader Mode, which is a temporary user toggle. The goal of PDF is still to produce documents that mirror print-ready layouts, something that HTML has never really accomplished. Whether you want to consume the documents that way will now be up to you.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#39When your digital document format needs artificial intelligence to understand the content, it may be the wrong container for delivering content. I'll be sad to see content that should be delivered as HTML instead delivered as liquid PDF.
According to this article, nothing will be "delivered" as liquid PDF, because it's a feature of the reader app, not the document. The point is that there are 30 years worth of existing, static, PDF documents - published as PDF for a potentially valid reason - which are frustrating to read on a mobile device.
If the AI is built in to a client side reader, that reader has to be installed on all clients, then kept up to date.
A frictionless solution would be for Adobe to offer the AI as a web service that renders legacy PDF files as HTML.