PDF Will Support JPEG XL Format As 'Preferred Solution' (theregister.com) 18
The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google's decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: "We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] content ... we have picked JPEG XL as our preferred solution." Wyatt also praised other benefits of JXL including wide gamut images, ultra-high resolution support for images with more than 1 billion pixels, and up to 4099 channels with up to 32 bits per channel.
The association is responsible for developing PDF specifications and standards and manages the ISO committee for PDF. JPEG XL is an advanced image format that was designed to be both more efficient and richer in features than JPEG. It was based on a combination of the Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) from Cloudinary and a Google project called PIK, first released in late 2020, and fully standardized in October 2021 as ISO/IEC 18181. There is a reference implementation called libjxl. A second edition of the ISO standard was published in 2024.
JXL appeared to have wide industry support, including experimental implementation in Chrome and Chromium, until it was killed by Google in October 2022 and removed from its web browser engine. The company stated that "there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL." Many in the community disagreed with the decision, including FLIF inventor Jon Sneyers, who perceived it as the outcome of an internal battle between proponents of JXL and a rival format, AVIF. "AVIF proponents within Chrome are essentially being prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time," he said.
The association is responsible for developing PDF specifications and standards and manages the ISO committee for PDF. JPEG XL is an advanced image format that was designed to be both more efficient and richer in features than JPEG. It was based on a combination of the Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) from Cloudinary and a Google project called PIK, first released in late 2020, and fully standardized in October 2021 as ISO/IEC 18181. There is a reference implementation called libjxl. A second edition of the ISO standard was published in 2024.
JXL appeared to have wide industry support, including experimental implementation in Chrome and Chromium, until it was killed by Google in October 2022 and removed from its web browser engine. The company stated that "there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL." Many in the community disagreed with the decision, including FLIF inventor Jon Sneyers, who perceived it as the outcome of an internal battle between proponents of JXL and a rival format, AVIF. "AVIF proponents within Chrome are essentially being prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time," he said.
WEBP is deprecated (Score:5, Informative)
JPEG XL is the open standard that replaces it.
Re: (Score:1)
Who modded this informative? WebP isn't deprecated in the slightest despite how much you wish it were. In fact it was only formally ratified as a standard literally exactly one year ago. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc... [rfc-editor.org] The lastest revision to the primary library was done less than 3 months ago.
WebP remains supported by all major platforms, unlike JPEG XL, and is in active use, unlike JPEG XL.
Yeah I too wish it were different, but seriously come join us in reality man.
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WebP 2 is almost certainly a dead-end.
WebP is almost always worse quality than JPEG for large lossy encoding, in part due to the limits of WebP's chroma subsampling options. It's a format designed for sending little icons over a mobile carrier network, and it's pretty terrible at doing what PNG or JPEG already do. WebP exists because animated GIFs can be massive and playback of embedded H.264/H.265/VP8/VP9 loops is a terrible user experience.
Actually deprecated? the industry isn't anywhere near the point wh
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AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.
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WebP only got an RFC (9649) in November 2024. JXL hasn't even got that far.
I hope JXL does catch on, but until Chrome supports it that will not happen. Maybe now that it's required for PDF display, Google will be forced to re-adopt it.
To be fair I think the reason they dropped support for JPEG XL is because the reference C library is crap, and last time I looked none of the alternatives were very mature. Hopefully things have improved by now.
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Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.
Re: WEBP is deprecated (Score:2)
Where have you been? On Windows, at least, the default is to view PDFs in Edge. If you install Chrome then the default changes to Chrome. There's no need for Adobe Reader anymore, and hasn't been in years.
PDF is run by idiots who don't understand security (Score:2)
oh it's worse and worse (Score:1)
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Because you can't send HTML
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Look at the history of the PDF spec. Way back, it allowed embedded javascript and ActiveX controls. It has zillions of features and allows almost arbitrary shit.
Back then security didn't exist as a concept. Everyone supported embedding ActiveX and Javascript.
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The bugs in the JBIG2 decoder is the biggest security hole in common PDF implementations that I'm aware of, or at least the most notorious.
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They took the Turing completeness out of Postscript and made PDF. That is a win for security. It's just everything else they put in after that.