Adobe's PDF technology cannot match the revolutionary potential of the quantum computer. However, the digital world is much more about the low portable document format than about the new computers. This is why you should note that Adobe is modernizing it for the smartphone age.
The company adds a new one AI Technology, liquid mode, to his acrobat Software to reformat files so they can be read on smartphones and other small screens, says Abhay Parasnis, Adobe chief technology officer.
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The Liquid mode announced on Wednesday plays an important role in our lives. Schools and workplaces are switched online, companies take over electronic transactions and people archive important documents on USB sticks and cloud storage services.
The technology fulfills a real need, says Adobe. PDFs are poorly adapted to Telephones. They don't fit the screens of the smaller devices. Users have to play around with the document to read it all.
"It just sucks. You have to pan and zoom," Parasnis said. "All of the things that make PDFs great make PDFs really bad on a phone."
How PDFs work in Liquid mode
Adobe's Liquid mode frees the file format from the legacy of a letter-size page. It uses its knowledge of other documents to predict a layout of text, graphics, and tables that will work on a small phone screen. When opening a new document, the regular PDF view is displayed by default. However, if you tap a button, it will be converted to Liquid mode.
The Acrobat app from Adobe will get Liquid mode on Wednesday. The company will also offer the technology to other companies, so you can see Liquid PDF in browsers, word processors, and other tools that process PDFs.
Adobe created PDF in 1992, but it is no longer proprietary because the company standardized the format through the International Organization for Standardization. And it's big. Trillions of PDF files have been created. Last year people used Adobe tools to open 250 billion PDFs. Every month, more than 92 million people use the Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app.
One limitation of Liquid mode is that it won't work for text that is just a large graphic element. For example, when you take a photo of a document with your phone. According to Parasnis, Adobe plans to improve Liquid mode with the scanning app's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, which will convert those graphics into text.
More Adobe ideas for the future of PDFs
Adobe's Liquid mode and PDF generation tools launched in July are two aspects of PDF modernization. Adobe has more of a make in mind about using Sensei, the brand name it is used for Artificial intelligence technology.
An upcoming upgrade is the ability to summarize a longer PDF using AI processing to gauge what's most important, Parasnis said. Another option is to infer the subject of a shorter PDF document and then refine it with background information from other sources.
"These documents are effectively becoming interactive, intelligent containers, rather than a digital form of an 8 1/2 by 11 inch page," said Parasnis.
Software to process PDFs raises serious concerns - PDF is practically a whole programming language - and AI adds another risk to the technology. AI algorithms can be fooled.
According to Parasnis, Adobe protects against possible abuse by working against distortions in the AI training data that can cause problems when the AI system is actually used. "You have to treat bias in an AI system like security," he said.
