Computable Document Format (CDF) is an electronic document format designed to allow authoring dynamically generated, interactive content. CDF was created by

Wolfram Research Wolfram Research, Inc. ( ) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. ...

, and CDF files can be created using

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

. As of 2021, the Wolfram Research website lists CDF as a "legacy" format; it has been replaced by Wolfram Computational Notebooks.

Features

Computable Document Format supports GUI elements such as sliders, menus, and buttons. Content is updated using embedded computation in response to GUI interaction. Contents can include formatted text, tables, images, sounds, and animations. CDF supports

typesetting and technical notation. Paginated layout, structured drill down layout, and slideshow mode are supported. Styles can be controlled using a cascading style sheet.

Reading

CDF files can be read using a proprietary CDF Player, downloadable from the Wolfram Research website but with a restricted license. In contrast to static formats such as

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

, the CDF Player contains an entire

runtime library A runtime library is a library that provides access to the runtime environment that is available to a computer program tailored to the host platform. A runtime environment implements the execution model as required for a development environme ...

of Mathematica allowing document content to be generated in response to user interactionWolfram punts expanded medium for technical docs
ThinQ and digital textbooks. CDF reader support is available for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

but not for e-book readers or Android tablets. The reader supports a plugin mode for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

Opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...

and

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

, which allows CDF content to be embedded inline in HTML pages.

Uses

Computable Document Format has been used in electronic books by

Pearson Education Pearson Education, known since 2011 as simply Pearson, is the educational publishing and services subsidiary of the international corporation Pearson plc. The subsidiary was formed in 1998, when Pearson plc acquired Simon & Schuster's educatio ...

, specifically MyMathLab, to provide the content for the

Wolfram Demonstrations Project The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an Open source, open-source collection of Interactive computing, interactive programmes called Demonstrations. It is hosted by Wolfram Research. At its launch, it contained 1300 demonstrations but has grown t ...

, and to add client-side interactivity to

Wolfram Alpha WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. History Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on Ma ...

.Wolfram Launches its own interactive document format
PC Pro, July 2011

References

{{Wolfram Research Computer-related introductions in 2011 Wolfram Research Electronic documents Open formats Page description languages Vector graphics Computer file formats Digital press

Features

Reading

Uses

See also

References