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 company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. Other products include Wo ...

, and CDF files can be created using

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimizat ...

. As of 2021, the Wolfram Research website lists CDF as a "legacy" format.

Features

Computable Document Format supports

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

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 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technol ...

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 in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

, the CDF Player contains an entire

runtime library In computer programming, a runtime library is a set of low-level routines used by a compiler to invoke some of the behaviors of a runtime environment, by inserting calls to the runtime library into compiled executable binary. The runtime enviro ...

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 group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

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 IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

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 current and a ...

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform 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 ...

Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...

and

Safari A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...

, 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 is a British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools and corporations, as well for students directly. Pearson owns educational media brands including Addison–Wesley, Peachpit, Prentice Hall, eCollege, ...

, specifically MyMathLab, to provide the content for the

Wolfram Demonstrations Project The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an organized, open-source collection of small (or medium-size) interactive programs called Demonstrations, which are meant to visually and interactively represent ideas from a range of fields. It is hos ...

, and to add client-side interactivity to

Wolfram Alpha WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. WolframAlpha was released on May 18, 2009 and is based on Wolfram's earlier product Wolfram Mathe ...

.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