You need to crank up zstd compression level.
zstd is Pareto better than brotli - compresses better and faster
I love zstd but this isn't necessarily true.
Are you sure? Admittedly I only have 1 PDF in my homedir, but no combination of flags to zstd gets it to match the size of brotli's output on that particular file. Even zstd --long --ultra -22.
I thought the same, so I ran brotli and zstd on some PDFs I had laying around.
I made a table because I wanted to test more files, but almost all PDFs I downloaded/had stored locally were already compressed and I couldn't quickly find a way to decompress them.Brotli seemed to have a very slight edge over zstd, even on the larger pdf, which I did not expect.