Comment by JyrkiAlakuijala
3 months ago
Would PDF 2.0 (which also depends JPEG XL and Brotli) put pressure on Firefox and Windows to add more easy to use support?
3 months ago
Would PDF 2.0 (which also depends JPEG XL and Brotli) put pressure on Firefox and Windows to add more easy to use support?
Brotli? Is it still relevant now that we have Zstandard?
Zstandard is much faster in just about every benchmark, sometimes Brotli has a small edge when it comes to compression ratio, but if you go for compression ratio over speed, LZMA2 beats them both.
Both Zstandard (zstd) and LZMA2 (xz) are widely supported, I think better supported than Brotli outside of HTTP.
Brotli decompresses 3-5x faster than LZMA2 and is within 0.6 % of the compression density, and much better for short documents.
ZStandard decompresses ~2x faster than Brotli but is 5 % less dense in compression density, and even less dense for short documents or documents where the static dictionary can be used.
Brotli is not slow to decompress -- generally a little faster then deflate through zlib.
Last time I measured, Brotli had ~2x smaller binary size than zstd (dec+enc).
Straight from the horse's mouth!
The thing is that Brotli is clearly optimized for the web (it even has a built-in dictionary), and ZStandard is more generic, being used for tar archives and the likes, I wonder how PDF would fit in here.
I don't think so: JPEG 2000, as far as I know, isn't generally supported for web use in web browsers, but it is supported in PDF.
> I don't think so: JPEG 2000, as far as I know, isn't generally supported for web use in web browsers, but it is supported in PDF.
Safari supported JPEG 2000 since 2010 but removed support last year [1].
[1]: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178758
So Firefox (or others) can't open a pdf with a embedded jpeg-2000/XL? Or does pdf.js somehow support it?
Seems like it: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js.openjpeg
This test renders correctly in Firefox, in any case: https://sources.debian.org/data/main/p/pdf2djvu/0.9.18.2-2/t...
Apparently I really flubbed my wording for this comment. I'm saying they do support it inside of PDF, just not elsewhere in the web platform.
JPEG-XL is recommended as the preferred format for HDR content for PDFs, so it’s more likely to be encountered:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/10/another_chance_for_jp...
I'm not convinced HDR PDFs will be a common thing anytime soon, even without this chicken and egg problem of support
What I mean to say is, I believe browsers do support JPEG 2000 in PDF, just not on the web.
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