ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss 6 months ago
It seems they're using the standard dictionary, which is utterly bizzare.
The standard Brotli dictionary bakes in a ton of assumptions about what the Web looked like in 2015, including not just which HTML tags were particularly common but also such things as which swear words were trendy.
It doesn't seem reasonable to think that PDFs have symbol probabilities remotely similar to the web corpus Google used to come up with that dictionary.
On top of that, it seems utterly daft to be baking that into a format which is expected to fit archival use cases and thus impose that 2015 dictionary on PDF readers for a century to come.
I too would strongly prefer that they use zstd.