TL;DR – 2021 was the year file formats finally caught up with the web‑first, mobile‑first world: royalty‑free, HDR‑ready, and AI‑friendly standards displaced many legacy codecs. PDF 2.0 and DOCX/ODF dominate documents, AVIF/WebP and HEIF win on images, Opus takes over real‑time audio, AV1 starts to replace HEVC for video, and columnar formats like Parquet + Arrow become the backbone of big‑data pipelines.
1. Documents & Publishing – Two Pillars, One Ecosystem Format 2021 status Why you should care PDF 2.