The PDF Association has announced its intention to integrate JPEG XL (JXL) as a preferred image format into the PDF specification. As Peter Wyatt, Chief Technology Officer of the PDF Association, explained at a European conference organized by the association, JPEG XL is the preferred solution for HDR content in PDF documents. The PDF Association develops the PDF specifications and manages the responsible ISO committee.

Wyatt justified the decision with the format’s technical advantages: in addition to high dynamic range, JPEG XL supports extended color spaces, ultra-high-resolution images with over a billion pixels, and up to 4099 channels with 32 bits per channel. These properties make the format particularly interesting for professional applications where maximum image quality and color fidelity are crucial.

JPEG XL was developed as a successor to the aging JPEG format and is based on a combination of Cloudinary’s Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) and Google’s PIK project. The first version was released at the end of 2020, and full ISO standardization as ISO/IEC 18181 was achieved in October 2021. A second edition of the standard was published in 2024.

The format initially seemed to be gaining broad support—untilGoogle unexpectedly removed its experimental implementation in Chrome and Chromium at the end of 2022. The company’s justification: there wasn’t enough interest across the ecosystem to continue with JPEG XL. The decision met with massive criticism in the tech industry, as Jon Sneyers, co-developer of JPEG XL and initiator of FLIF, explained at the time in an iX interview.

Internal struggles at Google as a trigger?

Sneyers suspected an internal conflict between JPEG XL proponents and representatives of the competing AVIF format behind Google’s decision. “AVIF proponents within Chrome are essentially prosecutors, judges, and executioners at the same time,” he criticized at the time in a statement. Like WebP, AVIF is derived from video codecs and is being pushed by the Chrome codec team, while JPEG XL was developed by a different Google team in Zurich.

The corresponding Chromium bug report, where the feature was marked as “obsolete,” has accumulated thousands of upvotes and numerous comments from developers urging Google to reverse course over the following three years—so far unsuccessfully.

Fragmented browser support

Outside of Chrome, JPEG XL has found isolated support: Apple integrates the format in iOS and macOS, but the preview app can only open images, not save them in JXL format. Safari also supports neither progressive display nor animated images. Microsoft offers an extension in the Windows Store for Windows 11; Edge itself, based on Chromium, does not support JXL.

Mozilla initially more or less followed Google, but then implemented experimental support in Firefox Nightly, which is not yet available in the main version. In September 2024, declared the team it would consider integration once a Rust-based decoder was available. The C++ reference implementation libjxl is considered a security risk due to its size.

Future integration into the PDF specification could give JPEG XL new relevance, especially since Chrome offers an integrated PDF viewer. Whether Google will reconsider the “obsolete” marking as a result remains to be seen. However, comprehensive browser support is essential for widespread use on the web and for images in general, and this is still lacking three years after Google’s withdrawal.

(fo)

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This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.