Adobe Unveils Ambitious Multi-Year Vision for PDF

Adobe announced the launch of Liquid Mode—the first step in a multi-year vision to fundamentally change the way people consume digital documents, and how organizations extract document intelligence to gain a competitive advantage. Leveraging the power of Adobe Sensei—Adobe’s cutting-edge AI framework—to understand the structure of PDFs, Adobe is reimagining how people read and interact with digital documents, starting with reinventing mobile productivity beyond the 8.5×11 page.

Abhigyan Modi, Country Manager, Adobe India, and VP Engineering, Adobe Document Cloud, said “This year has brought digital tools to the forefront and established their criticality to business continuity, resilience and success. With the launch of Liquid Mode – a breakthrough technology powered by years of deep ML research, document reading will now become a first-class experience on mobile. With no need to pinch and zoom and easy navigation, documents will be as easy to read as web pages. This is just a first step in our multi-year journey to fundamentally change the way people consume digital documents, and the way organizations extract information from PDFs.”

Introducing Liquid Mode

Manifesting the future of PDF, Liquid Mode delivers a breakthrough reading experience that enables a much easier way to read documents on mobile. Consuming content on mobile has long been a painful experience—especially if a document is long and wordy. In fact, new Adobe research shows that 95% of Indians wish most for stronger work/study features on their mobile reading device. For that reason, Liquid Mode will debut first in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app for iOS and Android, including Google Play Store-compatible Chromebooks, followed by desktops and browsers. With the push of a button, Liquid Mode will automatically reformat text, images, and tables for quick navigation and consumption on small screens.

Powered by Adobe Sensei, Liquid Mode uses AI and machine learning in the background to understand and identify parts of a PDF, like headings, paragraphs, images, lists, tables, and more. It also attempts to understand the hierarchy and ordering of those parts to reformat a static PDF into a more dynamic and customizable experience. Liquid Mode simultaneously creates an intelligent outline, collapsible and expandable sections, and searchable text for quick navigation. Users can even tailor font size and spacing between words, characters, and lines to suit their specific reading preferences. This is especially useful for those who may see text as too small, squished together, tight, or jumbled. With Liquid Mode, pinching and zooming is no longer necessary for users. Words are resizable and reflowable, images are tappable and expandable, and tables are responsive.

The Future of PDF

Adobe’s long-term vision for the future of PDF is centered around bringing more Sensei technology into all of its document products and services. This includes innovations, which allow AI to replace months of intensive document research with a quick query that cross-references millions of PDFs in an organization at once; or uncovering groundbreaking medical insights from PDF data spread across millions of scientific research reports, medical records, or academic studies. Unleashing this technology to state and local governments could also significantly improve coordination and collaboration across disparate agencies.

Abhigyan added, “As trends like remote working and digital learning move towards becoming a norm in India, businesses and educational institutes are increasingly placing their faith in technology to drive faster, safer and more streamlined digital document experiences. With Adobe’s legacy and deep understanding of digital documents and signatures, we hope to continue aiding in the next digital document revolution.”

Digital literacy has always been a significant priority for Adobe and through Liquid Mode, the firm is also exploring text personalization initiatives with partners and educational institutions to unlock the secrets of reading and retention for people of all ages and abilities. Giving people tools to view and extract content from PDFs, without changing the PDF itself, will help everyone gain more insight and power from the trillions of PDFs housed in enterprise storage systems, PCs, mobile devices, and on the web.

Delivering exceptional digital experiences is Adobe’s mission, and the company has been working to do just that for more than three decades. From the introduction of PDF in the early 1990’s, to unleashing it as an open standard in 2008, to the debut of Liquid Mode today, Adobe continues to define how the world works with digital documents, both personally and professionally.