ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
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Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#2tl;dr Commerical entity is paying to have the ISO altered to "legalize" their SDK they are pushing which is incompatible with standard PDF readers.
ISO is pay to play so :shrug:
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#3tl;dr Commerical entity is paying to have the ISO altered to "legalize" their SDK they are pushing which is incompatible with standard PDF readers. ISO is pay to play so :shrug:
I'm no fan of Adobe, but it is not that hard to add brotli support given that it is open. Probably can be added by AI without much difficulty - it is a simple feature. I think compared to the ton of other complex features PDF has, this is an easy one.
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#4Are they using a custom dictionary with Brotli designed for PDFs? I am not sure if it would help or not, but it seems like one of those cases it may help?
Something like this:
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/shared-dictionary-compress...
In my applications, in the area of 3D, I've been moving away from Brotli because it is just so slow for large files. I prefer zstd, because it is like 10x faster for both compression and decompression.
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#5tl;dr Commerical entity is paying to have the ISO altered to "legalize" their SDK they are pushing which is incompatible with standard PDF readers. ISO is pay to play so :shrug:
It's not even clear that they were the ones suggesting inclusion. They're just saying their library now supports the new thing.
https://pdfa.org/brotli-compression-coming-to-pdf/
> As of March 2025, the current development version of MuPDF now supports reading PDF files with Brotli compression. The source is available from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf, and will be included as an experimental feature in the upcoming 1.26.0 release.
> Similarly, the latest development version of Ghostscript can now read PDF files with Brotli compression. File creation functionality is underway. The next official Ghostscript release is scheduled for August this year, but the source is available now from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/Ghostpdl.
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#6How can iText claim that adding Brotli is not a backward incompatible change (in the "Why keep encoding separate" table)? In the first section the author states that any new feature must work seamlessly with existing readers. New documents created that include this compression would be unintelligible to any reader that only supports Deflate.
Am I missing something? Adoption will take a long time if you can't be confident the receiver of a document or viewers of a publication will be able to open the file.
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#7Some real cognitive dissonance in this article…
“The PDF Association operates under a strict principle—any new feature must work seamlessly with existing readers” followed by introducing compression as a breaking change in the same paragraph.
All this for brotli… on a read-many format like pdf zstd’s decompression speed is a much better fit.
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#8Why not zstd?
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#9Some real cognitive dissonance in this article… “The PDF Association operates under a strict principle—any new feature must work seamlessly with existing readers” followed by introducing compression as a breaking change in the same paragraph. All this for brotli… on a read-many format like pdf zstd’s decompression speed is a much better fit.
yup, zstd is better. Overall use zstd for pretty much anything that can benefit from a general purpose compression. It's a beyond excellent library, tool, and an algorithm (set of).
Brotli w/o a custom dictionary is a weird choice to begin with.
Re: ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss
#10'Your PDF:s will open slower because we decided that the CDN providers are more important than you'.
If size was important to users then it wouldn't be so common that systems providers crap out huge PDF files consisting mainly of layout junk 'sophistication' with rounded borders and whatnot.
The PDF/A stuff I've built stays under 1 MB for hundreds of pages of information, because it's text placed in a typographically sensible manner.