from Hacker News

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

by georgecalm on 9/23/20, 4:18 PM with 114 comments

by EE84M3i on 9/23/20, 4:40 PM
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.
by toddmorey on 9/23/20, 4:43 PM
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.
by markonen on 9/23/20, 4:59 PM
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.
by yegle on 9/23/20, 5:58 PM
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.
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.
by _coveredInBees on 9/23/20, 5:23 PM
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).
by mrbonner on 9/23/20, 4:44 PM
"Used AI and ML", Christ, we need AI and ML to read a static document now.
by saint-loup on 9/23/20, 6:25 PM
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.
by pier25 on 9/23/20, 6:08 PM
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.
by orf on 9/23/20, 5:03 PM
Imagine creating a document format so broken you need to build an artificial intelligence product to display it on smaller screens.
by spankalee on 9/23/20, 5:19 PM
This 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?
by atarian on 9/23/20, 5:29 PM
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.
by thelazydogsback on 9/23/20, 6:25 PM
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.
by villgax on 9/24/20, 3:33 AM
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!
by wombatmobile on 9/23/20, 4:36 PM
The internet already has this. It's called HTML.
by ilaksh on 9/23/20, 5:00 PM
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.
by personjerry on 9/24/20, 5:25 AM
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!
by bob1029 on 9/23/20, 6:02 PM
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.
by FormFollowsFunc on 9/23/20, 4:53 PM
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.
by millzlane on 9/23/20, 4:46 PM
I wish they put that AI and ML to use on the OCR functions in Acrobat.
by masswerk on 9/23/20, 6:34 PM
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.
by FandangoRanger on 9/23/20, 4:48 PM
Coming soon: PDF will become Flash!
by xtiansimon on 9/23/20, 7:08 PM
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.
by Emendo on 9/23/20, 5:21 PM
This 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.
by sambroner on 9/23/20, 4:35 PM
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.
by johnklos on 9/23/20, 6:43 PM
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.
by Naushad on 9/24/20, 6:19 AM
This is a good step forward to improve the consumption of PDFs. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consump...
by m0zg on 9/23/20, 5:51 PM
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.
by currymj on 9/23/20, 6:36 PM
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.
by fsflover on 9/23/20, 4:44 PM
I hope it will be an open standard (but I don't expect it from Adobe).
by matz1 on 9/23/20, 5:04 PM
Is this something new ? I've been using it for long time.
by jl6 on 9/23/20, 6:01 PM
My plans to replace HTML with PDF move further to fruition.
by keeptrying on 9/23/20, 5:29 PM
Liquid sends documents to Adobe cloud so use judiciously !
It is nice though.
by mrzool on 9/23/20, 4:45 PM
TL;DR: The plan is to make PDFs responsive through built-in machine learning for mobile consumption.
I’m very skeptical but somehow intrigued.
by riazrizvi on 9/23/20, 5:24 PM
Are they mining bitcoin? My phone becomes super hot when I visit the link.
by distalx on 9/23/20, 6:44 PM
how this is different from 'epub'?
by xwdv on 9/23/20, 4:45 PM
Adobe is a great company to invest in.
by fierarul on 9/23/20, 5:26 PM
Can Apple kill PDF too, please?
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!
by young_unixer on 9/24/20, 5:30 AM
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.