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

There’s a lot to consider here, and I’m certainly encouraged by Adobe's long standing focus on consistent PDF view experiences. (At least compared to other formats)

That being said, this feels somewhat like Adobe will turn PDFs into a form of markdown where the parser is a (variable?) machine learning algorithm.

Done perfectly, the results could be great. Done badly and the results would be very painful.

Isn'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 PDFs, but I feel sorry for whatever damned soul is going to have to expand hard-coded limits in order to fit the new PDF specification text into a single PDF document.

When 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.

I hope it will be an open standard (but I don't expect it from Adobe).