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?)
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.