Adobe Announces Liquid Mode | Readability Matters

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

Today Ashley Still, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Digital Media at Adobe, announced Liquid Mode and new Readability Features in Adobe Reader. Given the frustrations of reading documents on mobile devices, Adobe has made these new features available first in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app for iOS and Android, including Google Play Store-compatible Chromebooks. Later they will be added to desktops and browsers.

Using the reading settings available in Liquid Mode, readers can change font size, and spacing between characters and lines. “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. Words are resizable and reflowable, images are tappable and expandable, and tables are responsive.”

Readability Matters celebrates these critical new features that significantly advance personalized reading for knowledge workers and students. As research has demonstrated, using Personalized Reading Formats increases reading speed, accuracy, and comprehension. Given the more than 2.5 Trillion PDFs in the world today, making PDF content reflowable and personalizable enables all of us to be more efficient and effective.

Digital literacy has always been a significant priority for Adobe. Through Liquid Mode, we are 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…

Today is the beginning of an exciting new frontier where we will fundamentally change the PDF experience — again and forever.

Ashley Still, Adobe

Read Adobe’s full announcement.

About Adobe
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Originally published at https://readabilitymatters.org on September 23, 2020.