Adobe is a great company to invest in.
Objectively true. Adobe makes a lot of cash.
And that's why my portfolio is Adobe, Oracle, Haliburton, Bank of America and Comcast.
Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
61–70 of 119 posts
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#62The internet already has this. It's called HTML.
A standard that is too open ;-) Better have an alternative that is controlled by one company. Shareholders like that. Think social media, ads, apps.
PDFs can do all sorts of voodoo (like you can do with HTML if you hate the user's browser) to make legible content that is pretty illegible to machines - but most documents are produced by tools that have pretty sane outputs that can be reverse parsed to get a pretty nice HTML blob.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#63Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#64Dear god please no. PDFs suck, but they're the only viable medium for scientific publication, and they aren't "broken" for that. Do not fuck them up with your proprietary crap, Adobe.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#65Is 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.
Exactly, and this feature could encourage more people to use PDFs in context where they should not really be used, because of having a false sense of security that their document will somehow magically be reflowed on devices that it wasn't authored to display on.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#66Just downloaded the Adobe Acrobat Reader on Android.
It looks like the Liquid mode won't show up in the app if the device doesn't have Internet connection (kudos for graceful degradation here). Once you connect to the Internet and restart the app, you'll prompt to login to Adobe Document Cloud account to use this feature.
I tested a couple of PDFs and a lot of these files are showing "Liquid Mode isn't yet available for this file.", including: a Loan Estimation doc from LoanDepot, a PGE statement file, a Payment Notification from Nationwide.
It does work very well on https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000174-abca-d59c-a174-ffde1.... Outline, concatenation of multi page sections, inline footnote reference are all working as expected.
If this works for more types of document that would be awesome.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It seems to work well to me so I don't know what you mean by conceptually broken or single format files. Having a single file that you can zoom in and out on was one of the original multi-touch demos in the TED talk, years before the iphone.
I'm also not sure why they are different from anything else when it comes to 'needing to consume them on mobile'.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#68My plans to replace HTML with PDF move further to fruition.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#69Earlier 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.
That would be the case if a PDF was solely used for print.
In the digital realm though, a PDF should also be accessible to screenreaders for the blind, people with sight problems (increased fonts, contrast), dyslexia, etc. Those already require alternative representations.
And of course nothing bad about having the best of both worlds! A format that is pixel perfect when you want it too, and adaptable for easier reading when you don't.
Re: Adobe unveils multi-year vision for PDF, introduces Liquid Mode
#70Sounds like Adobe is trying to add media queries and a dynamic DOM to PDF.
Perhaps they should consider leaving PDF the fuck alone and reiterating to developers that HTML & CSS are the appropriate technologies for producing documents which must reflow based upon viewport dimensions.