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.
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.
About "responsive PDFs": there's already a "reflow" feature in Acrobat Reader. It's limited but kinda works on clean PDFs. I don't know to what extent it's a explicit possibility of the PDF standard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. It seems that a lot of people aren't getting past the title, so now there are a bunch of misguided comments peppered all over the thread about needing to use AI to read PDFs, which is definitely not what the announcement is saying.
Content reflowing isn't easy for pdf files. Xodo has this functionality for years and it rarely get the line break right, so there is some use for ML in this. (Or do you happen to know a pdf reader that is better in this?)
Just 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.
Is 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.
> 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.
Come on people, what's the name of this site again? Granted, my first reaction was the same as many commenters here: "Responsive PDfs? Oh the irony!"
But as a reader of essays and textbooks on a small tablet, let me tell you it's can be useful. Yeah, it's not elegant. It a clever technical solution to a real-world problem made of decades of path dependency.
You might call it a hack.
If this had been from some kid in his basement and not from a corporate press release (admittedly pompous, overselling and worrying privacy-wise), you would have cheer.
For 4 years I worked at a publishing/education company and developped on a solution for educational interactive ebooks in HTML.
A couple of insights from those years:
PDF is popular because it fits the paper designer mindset and because Adobe InDesign is pretty much the standard in the publishing industry.
HTML is a much better format for the digital age. It's responsive, interactive, etc, but even today, the best way to produce HTML is by using a code editor.
Even if there was a good WYSIWYG tool, editorial designers come from the paper world and have a really hard time understanding the responsive model.
Many times I've fantasized about working on a tool made for designers to produce HTML, but it would be a ton of work and I don't really think there is a market for it. Many ebook formats are actually HTML, but I think the industry is getting by with conversion tools from Word. Most HTML content comes from blogs and journals which already have an established pipeline and don't need a general purpose HTML production solution. Education is the strongest use case, but most education companies are still rooted in paper and switching to interactive education is quite a leap.
Its not broken, its just abused. PDF is create for printing, its not great for anything smaller than an A4 page. Other formats exist which do that fine. If you use pdf for what it was made for its fine.
I hope it's not just for mobile -- PDFs are good for printing, but not much else. Even viewing explicitly-paged documents (esp. w/two columns) is painful. I'll be happy if I can skip all the zooming and panning I have to do on laptops and tablets as well. The only time I don't have to do this is on a large portrait-mode external monitor.
Liquid mode doesn't work with PDFs above 200 pages, the whole point was to be able to read books without zooming & scrolling within every page & this arbitrary limit!
Liquid mode? It looks like a tool to reflow the content in existing PDFs, which are often intentionally not responsive. I don't see how this is similar to HTML.
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.
The problem is that the PDF standard tells each letter where on the page to sit. If you need an AI to dynamically re-render the page, what good is that standard?
PDFs are good for one thing only: Printing.
I wish academia would stop using PDF to distribute online, so their documents would be easier to parse!
Sounds 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.
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.
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.
Notably, this also means a lock-in in traditional layouts, as I doubt that an AI trained on the usual corpus would parse any non-traditional, maybe even dissociated layouts well. And, since there's apparently no way to control the reflow, this means serial presentation, all the way, just to make sure that your content will be presented in a meaningful way.
This is a bit ironic, since the USP of PDF has always been its ability to preserve individual presentations in a portable format, which made it also ideal for sharing and archiving non-traditional presentations of content.
Liquid Mode ?= Reader Mode. Ok. As long as I can still read Old PDFs, and the file size stays small. Why not.
I don’t see any way to improve tables in PDF. Most of the PDFs I deal with are invoices, statements, tabular reports.
As long as we’re on the topic of PDFs...what the heck is up with PDFs always asking if you want to save, even when you only opened them (no changes; using setting ‘Use only certified plug-ins’ & ‘do not show edit warnings’). Ridiculous.
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.
Adobe can't write secure or portable software for shit. They only ever want to be the stewards for something so they can make money off of it, often precisely to the detriment of the rest of the world.
No Internet content should EVER be loaded by Adobe software by default. Ever. Their security history has clearly shown us that.
Dear 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.
i actually expect that this will work pretty well, at least for academic articles, because the machine learning engineers working on it will constantly be "dogfooding" it, as machine learning research is published mostly as PDFs.
I'm especially enraged at the PDF "forms" XFA or whatever that no software on this planet can open except Adobe Reader. And Adobe Reader even on macOS doesn't allow Print to PDF or something else to get a PDF in a "sane" format.
I have to use a fake printer to trick Adobe Reader about this! Incredible!
Fun loophole that usually works--so Adobe Acrobat on the Mac doesn't let you use the default Print to PDF functionality, BUT if instead of selecting PDF you print to Postscript it will work.
My thoughts regarding HTML as an alternative to this:
1. AFAIK, there is no standard way to bundle a webpage containing images into a single file.
2. We have EPUB, and my experience using it has been horrible. Either the format is bad or somehow every single reader I've used sucks, and I've tried many (Foliate and the now defunct Readium Chrome extension are the ones that suck the less, but the experience is still much worse than reading a PDF)
At this point, solving the bundling problem of HTML (and using normal web browsers) seems like a better course of action than trying to use EPUB.
3. Text that always fills the width of the screen sucks if you're using a screen bigger than 10 inches.
Being able to coerce a document into a page whose border is clearly delimited (just like PDF readers do it) without having to resize windows is, in my opinion, an absolute necessity. Something like:
body {
border: solid black;
max-width: 25em;
}
Epub readers allow defining widths (or semi-equivalently: margins) but they always look bad because there isn't a visual boundary.
You could embed images using data: URLs. There are size limits in some browsers, particularly older ones, but you can manage some pretty high-resolution images under the limits in a modern browser.
EE84M3i|5 years ago
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.
modernerd|5 years ago
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.
saint-loup|5 years ago
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...
toddmorey|5 years ago
alanbernstein|5 years ago
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.
copperx|5 years ago
I laugh now as I laughed back then.
markonen|5 years ago
munk-a|5 years ago
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.
ebg13|5 years ago
iflp|5 years ago
yegle|5 years ago
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.
_coveredInBees|5 years ago
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).
legitster|5 years ago
CyberDildonics|5 years ago
mrbonner|5 years ago
ebg13|5 years ago
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.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
rietta|5 years ago
saint-loup|5 years ago
But as a reader of essays and textbooks on a small tablet, let me tell you it's can be useful. Yeah, it's not elegant. It a clever technical solution to a real-world problem made of decades of path dependency.
You might call it a hack.
If this had been from some kid in his basement and not from a corporate press release (admittedly pompous, overselling and worrying privacy-wise), you would have cheer.
pier25|5 years ago
A couple of insights from those years:
PDF is popular because it fits the paper designer mindset and because Adobe InDesign is pretty much the standard in the publishing industry.
HTML is a much better format for the digital age. It's responsive, interactive, etc, but even today, the best way to produce HTML is by using a code editor.
Even if there was a good WYSIWYG tool, editorial designers come from the paper world and have a really hard time understanding the responsive model.
Many times I've fantasized about working on a tool made for designers to produce HTML, but it would be a ton of work and I don't really think there is a market for it. Many ebook formats are actually HTML, but I think the industry is getting by with conversion tools from Word. Most HTML content comes from blogs and journals which already have an established pipeline and don't need a general purpose HTML production solution. Education is the strongest use case, but most education companies are still rooted in paper and switching to interactive education is quite a leap.
orf|5 years ago
tinus_hn|5 years ago
A pdf file is a program that outputs pages you can display or print. There are no more restrictions to the format.
That’s why without some artificial intelligence you can’t edit or reflow the contents.
Polylactic_acid|5 years ago
spankalee|5 years ago
Where are the changes to the PDF format that will help other viewers understand hierarchy and relayout pages without Adobe's ML engine?
atarian|5 years ago
munk-a|5 years ago
I do agree it's disappointing that they can't just process it locally though.
thelazydogsback|5 years ago
villgax|5 years ago
wombatmobile|5 years ago
tkzed49|5 years ago
random3|5 years ago
Gys|5 years ago
Better have an alternative that is controlled by one company. Shareholders like that. Think social media, ads, apps.
ilaksh|5 years ago
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.
marcthe12|5 years ago
personjerry|5 years ago
PDFs are good for one thing only: Printing.
I wish academia would stop using PDF to distribute online, so their documents would be easier to parse!
bob1029|5 years ago
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.
FormFollowsFunc|5 years ago
Finnucane|5 years ago
millzlane|5 years ago
alok-g|5 years ago
They should start with a better prediction of the zoom level and single/continuous page rendering modes when opening a PDF document.
masswerk|5 years ago
This is a bit ironic, since the USP of PDF has always been its ability to preserve individual presentations in a portable format, which made it also ideal for sharing and archiving non-traditional presentations of content.
FandangoRanger|5 years ago
flareback|5 years ago
xtiansimon|5 years ago
I don’t see any way to improve tables in PDF. Most of the PDFs I deal with are invoices, statements, tabular reports.
As long as we’re on the topic of PDFs...what the heck is up with PDFs always asking if you want to save, even when you only opened them (no changes; using setting ‘Use only certified plug-ins’ & ‘do not show edit warnings’). Ridiculous.
Emendo|5 years ago
sambroner|5 years ago
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.
jfk13|5 years ago
Sounds like a way to extend vendor lock-in, as nobody else will be able to implement the same algorithm with any assurance of interoperability.
johnklos|5 years ago
No Internet content should EVER be loaded by Adobe software by default. Ever. Their security history has clearly shown us that.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
Naushad|5 years ago
m0zg|5 years ago
currymj|5 years ago
fsflover|5 years ago
matz1|5 years ago
jl6|5 years ago
keeptrying|5 years ago
It is nice though.
mrzool|5 years ago
I’m very skeptical but somehow intrigued.
riazrizvi|5 years ago
distalx|5 years ago
Polylactic_acid|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
xwdv|5 years ago
justinzollars|5 years ago
fierarul|5 years ago
I'm especially enraged at the PDF "forms" XFA or whatever that no software on this planet can open except Adobe Reader. And Adobe Reader even on macOS doesn't allow Print to PDF or something else to get a PDF in a "sane" format.
I have to use a fake printer to trick Adobe Reader about this! Incredible!
a2tech|5 years ago
young_unixer|5 years ago
1. AFAIK, there is no standard way to bundle a webpage containing images into a single file.
2. We have EPUB, and my experience using it has been horrible. Either the format is bad or somehow every single reader I've used sucks, and I've tried many (Foliate and the now defunct Readium Chrome extension are the ones that suck the less, but the experience is still much worse than reading a PDF)
At this point, solving the bundling problem of HTML (and using normal web browsers) seems like a better course of action than trying to use EPUB.
3. Text that always fills the width of the screen sucks if you're using a screen bigger than 10 inches.
Being able to coerce a document into a page whose border is clearly delimited (just like PDF readers do it) without having to resize windows is, in my opinion, an absolute necessity. Something like:
body { border: solid black; max-width: 25em; }
Epub readers allow defining widths (or semi-equivalently: margins) but they always look bad because there isn't a visual boundary.
darrenf|5 years ago
There’s mhtml, though I can’t speak to how well supported it is. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2557
cwp|5 years ago