One of the pitfalls of reading PDF files on small e-readers and smartphones, is all of the pinching and zooming you have to do. This is why devices have been increasing in size, in order to make the experience as fluid as possible. Adobe Acrobat is one of the most popular apps to read this format and it is gaining new functionality for smaller screens.
Adobe has launched a new feature it calls “Liquid Mode.” Liquid Mode taps Adobe’s AI engine, Sensei, to analyze a PDF and automatically rebuild it for mobile devices. According to Adobe, Liquid Mode uses AI and machine learning to identify key components of a PDF — like headings, paragraphs, images, lists and tables — and then reformats those parts from static to dynamic based on the hierarchy and ordering. Making the reflow process ideal for for smaller screens. Liquid Mode simultaneously creates an outline, collapsible and expandable sections, and searchable text. Users can also tailor font size and spacing between words, characters, and lines. Words are resizable, images are tappable and expandable, and tables are responsive.
“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,” Adobe said in a blog post. “Delivering exceptional digital experiences is our mission, and we’ve been working in service of our customers 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, we continue to define how the world works with digital documents, both personally and professionally.”
Liquid Mode is available in the free Adobe Acrobat reader app for iOS and Android, including Google Play Store-compatible Chromebooks. Unfortunately, since it is still a developing technology, Liquid Mode is currently limited to PDF documents under 10MB and less than 200 pages long.
Good e-Reader will be conducting a video review on Adobe Liquid on various e-readers. This might make products that are running Android and have full access to Google Play ideal for PDF files.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.