Adobe Blog: “Adobe unveils ambitious multi-year vision for PDF: Introduces Liquid Mode”

Building on this continued momentum, today we’re excited to unveil 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 — our cutting-edge AI framework — to understand the structure of PDFs, we have begun to reimagine how people read and interact with digital documents, starting with reinventing mobile productivity beyond the 8.5x11 page.

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With the push of a button, Liquid Mode automatically reformats 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.

Ashley Still

I mean… sure, making PDF files more responsive and accessible on mobile screens is a good initiative, but why do you need AI and machine learning to read the structure of a document?! Websites built on standard HTML have been doing that basically from inception. While PDF is a proprietary format, it is owned and built be Adobe, so… they cannot understand their own document format without building an AI for the task?! This announcement reads like it was written to promote Adobe Sensei and buzzwords like AI and machine learning, not to launch an interesting new feature for customers.

Improvements for Chrome’s print preview

After a week of less stable builds, with constant crashes while playing Flash videos and a weird disappearing-scroll-bar bug, the Canary build of Google Chrome – now at version 12.0.741.0 – is back to being usable as a day-to-day browser. Along with the bug fixes, the team behind the browser started rolling out a long-awaited feature: the print preview. Available for some time as an experiment to be enabled from about:flags, it didn’t actually do much until recently. Now upon clicking ‘Print’ the browser opens an internal page, with a set of controls on the left and the preview on the right.

The available options are nothing out of the ordinary: you can choose the printer, layout, what pages to print and how many, color output or black-and-white. The preview is powered by Chrome’s internal PDF viewer, as witnessed by the toolbar that pops up when you hover on the bottom right corner; if it’s disabled the preview pane will remain empty. So if you need the preview, enable the internal viewer on the plug-ins page – about:plugins. The single extra that Chrome offers compared to other browsers is the ability to save the printed page as a PDF file, by selecting ‘Print to PDF’ as destination. Interestingly, this one works with both the Adobe and the built-in plug-in.

Print multiple PDF files

Even if the world seems to embrace digital content more and more with each passing day, in most cases you don’t have to look further than your own office to see how far that ideal still is. Corporations still like to keep records of basically everything in hardcopy. The bigger the company, the bigger the paper trail. I was building a PDF archive, hoping I can convince the management that’s enough. As that became increasingly unlikely, I found myself facing a problem: how to print all those PDF files with the least effort on my part?

Convert your PDF files to Google Docs documents

After months of experimenting, Google Docs has released the OCR feature in the standard web interface: when you upload a document, there is a new check box – unchecked by default - Convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs documents. I first spotted it yesterday, but it wasn’t functional yet. Nothing different happened to the files I uploaded as test and the check box kept disappearing when I refreshed the page. Today it looks much more stable and I was able to try the actual character recognition.

The results are mixed, as expected. The conversion is pretty fast, at least with small files. Instead of an image or PDF, you now have a document in the dashboard, containing the extracted text and, for PDF files, images of the corresponding original pages. The Download Squad article covering the news points out that if you want to share the original file you have to upload two versions of it, but that’s actually how all uploads to Google Docs are handled: you can either use it as storage or convert to their internal format for editing, with the expected loss of fidelity. What I would like to see instead is an option to perform OCR on files uploaded before the feature was introduced. Right now the only solution is to download and re-upload them with conversion on.