Mobile working with PDF documents improves

Trends in the digital working world

The modern working world is constantly evolving. This process was also greatly accelerated by the pandemic. At the centre of the change is the ever-increasing digitalisation of a wide variety of work processes.

The changes in the world of work are also changing the way we work. The focus is particularly on flexibility and hybrid forms of work. Many employees are looking for more freedom (in terms of location and time) and a sense of purpose, and companies are adapting their corporate culture accordingly. The classic office work forms such as “9to5” are increasingly changing. Work no longer follows the classic pattern, but flexibility is required, i.e. a mix of important video calls/online meetings, which should be concentrated and used sensibly and supplemented with live conversations and telephone calls. Employees and companies need to adapt to these new ways of working (towards asynchronous communication vs. synchronous communication). What is changing in concrete terms?

That is why more and more will be needed in the future: simple, easy-to-use document workflows (i.e. information should be available anytime, anywhere).

MOBILE WORKING – Mobile working with PDF documents

In the working and business world, the PDF format is used whenever documents need to be reliably displayed, printed, edited, sent and archived. Since this can also be done easily while on the move, it is very much in line with modern work processes.

Now the focus is on working with apps on mobile smartphones. More and more people now read digital documents exclusively on mobile devices. But unfortunately, files with different fonts and formatted images, lists and tables are difficult to read on a smartphone. Navigation and use only work statically and slowly.

However, PDF documents have become indispensable in the modern working world, precisely because they can be used to exchange documents with a layout that is true to the original. But this is precisely what can become a problem when using a mobile phone, because users then have a less comfortable reading experience due to the much smaller display. Reading PDF files on a smartphone has not always been so ideal.

Adobe wants to improve the user experience when working on the move

A new feature for Acrobat Reader now makes it easier to read and use PDF documents on smartphones. With the reading mode Liquid Mode developed by Acrobat Reader, PDF documents can now always be made available to fit the smaller mobile phone screen format.  In Liquid Mode, the PDF also retains its layout, it is only read in a different reading mode.

Artificial intelligence is used for this. The text in the PDF is placed in a long, screen-wide column and the images are inserted in the appropriate places in the new layout. In addition, the user can adjust the font, the size of the font, the letter spacing and the line spacing of the texts in Acrobat Reader. Images can be tapped to enlarge them and tables adapt dynamically to the available screen width.

Note: Liquid Mode does not always work properly with large PDF documents with more than 200 pages, with scanned documents or if the PDF has a very complex structure. Also: To use it, you must be registered in the Adobe Cloud/Adobe.

https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobat/android/en/lmode.html