No excuses: Brotli compression advances PDF

Are your applications ready?

The PDF Association is proud to announce the publication of the industry specification for Brotli compression in PDF.

As digital documents continue to evolve, the need for efficient, modern compression methods remains a key priority for the PDF ecosystem. PDF Association members previously selected Brotli as the new standard for lossless compression in PDF, providing a significant step forward from existing methods like Flate and LZW.

Why Brotli?

• Superior compression ratios: Compared to traditional filters, Brotli offers significantly better compression for a wide variety of PDF content.
• Patent-free & open: Brotli is a well-standardized, license-free, and open specification (IETF’s RFC 7932 and RFC 9841). It’s widely used in web technologies, ensuring interoperability and ease of adoption across platforms.
• Efficient: With a design focused on performance, Brotli provides excellent compression with reasonable resource requirements for both creation and consumption.

The new specification introduces the BrotliDecode filter, allowing for seamless integration into existing PDF software. With several members (listed below) and popular OSS implementations (such as Google’s pdfium and Mozilla’s pdf.js) already supporting Brotli, we encourage all developers, vendors, and the wider PDF community to adopt the specification and implement this state-of-the-art compression in their PDF software.

Brotli’s benefits for PDF have been known for a while. We have been strongly hinting at the importance of improved user experience for these significant step-up improvements to PDF for over 2 years. With the formal publication of this specification, it’s now time for all vendors to implement or risk being left behind.

PDF Association members currently supporting Brotli include:

• Artifex
• BFO
• IDRsolutions
• iText
• SetaSign

Download Brotli compression in PDF today!