Adobe has announced an upgrade to its Acrobat Reader software on Android and IOS that should make it easier to read PDF files on a mobile device. It uses something called Sensei AI to reformat the document for the small screen. It's similar to the reading mode option on some browsers.
The new Liquid Mode in Adobe Reader uploads your document to Adobe’s cloud service where it’s processed by Sensei to identify items like headers, images, and text blocks. The document is then delivered back to your device with a new mobile-friendly layout. Huge blocks of tiny text that run off the screen are automatically placed in line and given proper paragraph spacing, images fit neatly and take the rest of the document into account, and it can even make some sections collapsible. Essentially, it’s giving PDFs the kind of responsive design we expect from modern webpages.
Liquid Mode is unfortunately limited to Adobe’s Reader software for Android and iOS right now. So, if you’re attached to a third-party PDF app, you’re out of luck. That, of course, pushes people to Adobe’s own product, but in an interview with Fast Company, reps for the firm insisted that the primary motivation behind the feature was to find a solution to the problem that PDFs just aren’t as useful on mobile and people close these documents the minute they see what they’re getting into. Devs at Adobe went as far as exploring a new format altogether but decided that the ubiquity and compatibility of PDFs made them worth adapting.
It won't work if your document is bigger than 10 MB in size or if it's longer than 200 pages and, at this point, there's no desktop equivalent.
I tested it on this report on satellite constellations and it worked quite well; the document was readable on my Pixel 4a, unlike the original PDF layout. To open Liquid View, first open the file in Acrobat Reader, then touch the leftmost icon at the top of the screen.
I must admit that I am impressed.
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