Something they didn't really mention was that this requires uploading the document to their cloud, which I'm afraid is a pretty big downside.
Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
51–60 of 119 posts
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#52Is everyone in such a rush to comment that they don't even bother to RTFA? A majority of the comments here are knee-jerk reactions to a headline that was misunderstood...smh. Liquid mode is simply a tool to make it easier to consume PDF content on mobile devices. This is definitely a good thing especially since it is opt-in (you press a button to engage liquid mode in the reader).
The problem is that PDF has already had a few cycles of adding and then shedding off useless, and frankly, dangerous ideas because they keep trying fit a square peg in a round hole.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#53Isn'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.
>It's a button you click to automatically make a fixed-layout PDF fluid and easier to read on mobile.
But this of course reminds us of the miserable UX we have come to accept from the "mobile web". In the beginning, mobile websites didn't exist, and you just zoomed. Now, it's practically impossible to view the desktop website from a phone at some URLs without jailbreaking your device (if it's iOS). The net effect has been a severe degradation of usability in the worst cases for a small improvement in aesthetics and speed in the best.
I truly hope that PDFs do not meet the same fate, and remain readable on mobile in the correct layout, with no in-document markers that force my iPhone to display it wrong. While that apparently hasn't been proposed here, I don't like even the risk of it being proposed.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#54Is everyone in such a rush to comment that they don't even bother to RTFA? A majority of the comments here are knee-jerk reactions to a headline that was misunderstood...smh. Liquid mode is simply a tool to make it easier to consume PDF content on mobile devices. This is definitely a good thing especially since it is opt-in (you press a button to engage liquid mode in the reader).
The problem is that PDF has already had a few cycles of adding and then shedding off useless, and frankly, dangerous ideas because they keep trying fit a square peg in a round hole.
That may be, but it still has no real relevance to this article unless people just want any excuse to get on their soapbox to rant about Adobe/PDF without even bothering to read the article and what it is talking about.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#55When 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.
I'm not convinced this is even a feature of the reader app. When they click "Liquid Mode", it says "Processing in Document Cloud" which means they're sending all your PDFs to their servers? Make sure you don't click Liquid Mode on any sensitive documents!
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#56Earlier 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.
It's not crazy to have a device-independent presentational document that also contains enough data to enable some device-dependent rendering of its text and media contents.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#57Is everyone in such a rush to comment that they don't even bother to RTFA? A majority of the comments here are knee-jerk reactions to a headline that was misunderstood...smh. Liquid mode is simply a tool to make it easier to consume PDF content on mobile devices. This is definitely a good thing especially since it is opt-in (you press a button to engage liquid mode in the reader).
Touch screens already make reading pdfs pretty easy, this seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#58A 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.
I disagree - this is just a change in the reader but it cascades into format changes.
I don't know if you've ever had the fun of writing a website using bootstrap and then having a client complain that the page layout changes (i.e. becomes responsive) when the window is resized. I've hit that a few times with things that need to go through audits/agency approvals and in those cases you can pull out some of the @media tags and call it a day.
Imagine having to make sure that liquid mode won't reflow a document that was signed off on by the FDA because there's a concern that the ISI (important safety instructions) box required to occupy 10% of real estate on that page might be shrunk to occupy 5%.
I agree this announcement is a lot less disruptive than the statement initially makes it look, but it's still going to have knock on effects.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#59Is everyone in such a rush to comment that they don't even bother to RTFA? A majority of the comments here are knee-jerk reactions to a headline that was misunderstood...smh. Liquid mode is simply a tool to make it easier to consume PDF content on mobile devices. This is definitely a good thing especially since it is opt-in (you press a button to engage liquid mode in the reader).
Touch screens already make reading pdfs pretty easy, this seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Eh, I don't like 2D scrolling, it is a lot more of a pain then 1D scrolling - so I think it's a valid problem to try and resolve. That said I also think PDFs are just conceptually broken when it comes to mobile devices - you specifically don't want single format files on that device and, often times, you don't need to consume them on mobile.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#60Something they didn't really mention was that this requires uploading the document to their cloud, which I'm afraid is a pretty big downside.
It's okay - it'll be hard to find your document among all the harry potter fan-fiction they'll be OCRing.
I do agree it's disappointing that they can't just process it locally though.