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The PDF Association will add support for the JPEG XL (JXL) image format to the PDF spec, according to a recently published presentation from the org's European conference. This inclusion means that JXL may yet gain mainstream adoption, despite being declared obsolete by the Chromium team.
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.
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Since the Chromium tracking bug for the feature was updated to "obsolete", it has continued to attract comments, sometimes bad-tempered, appealing to Google to reconsider, along with thousands of upvotes for the feature.
In the meantime, some support for JXL has appeared elsewhere. Apple has added support in iOS and macOS, though its Preview image utility can open but not save in the format, and Safari does not support progressive rendering or animated images, according to a depressing (for JXL advocates) table from Can I Use.
Microsoft Edge, based on Chromium, does not support JXL but the company does offer an extension for Windows 11, available for download from the Windows Store.
Mozilla includes opt-in support for JXL in the preview build Firefox Nightly, but this has yet to be included in the general release. In September 2024 the team said it would consider adoption when a Rust-based decoder is available, but believes the large size of the reference decoder, written in C++, to be a security risk.
Chrome includes PDF support so JXL adoption in the PDF specification will make the obsolete tag hard to justify. That said, the format is of little practical use on the web, or for general image exchange, until it is widely supported. The Chromium team has been resolute in rejecting arguments for reconsideration for over three years, and until it does, the format it likely to remain loved by developers but little used. ®
