The AI-Powered PDF Marks the End of an Era
CommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyWhen it was first released by Adobe in 1993, the PDF was truly transformative technology.The Portable Document Format was a multipurpose container that replicated the appearance and functionality of physical documents. That sounds unimportant, but as adoption spread with Adobe’s introduction of free Acrobat software for reading PDFs a year later, anyone, from the government to your doctor’s office, could rely on digital documentation that felt familiar to the paper versions.“It wasn’t like a text message, which is a native digital format or an email or a web page,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland and author of Track Changes, a book about the history of word…
