Introducing the Computable Document Format (CDF)

Today's online documents are like yesterday's paper—flat, lifeless, inactive. Instead, CDF puts easy-to-author interactivity at its core, empowering readers to drive content and generate results live.

Launched by the Wolfram Group, the CDF standard is a computation-powered knowledge container—as everyday as a document, but as interactive as an app.

Adopting CDF gives ideas a broad communication pipeline—accelerating research, education, technical development, and progress.

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Why Use the Computable Document Format (CDF)?

CDF offers content creators easy-to-author interactivity and convenient deployment options—empowering their readers to drive content and generate results live.

Key Advantages of CDF:

Broader communication pipeline: Create content as everyday as a document, but as interactive
as an app.

Built-in computation: Let the reader drive new discovery—live.

Easy-to-author interactivity: Use automated functions and plain English input instead of specialist programming skills for a wide range of applications.

Deployment flexibility: Create once—deploy as slide shows, reports, books, applications, and web objects.

Integrated knowledge: Access specialized algorithms, data, and visualizations for hundreds of subjects

 

Features of CDF Documents

From bloggers, students, and teachers to business consultants, scientists, engineers, or publishers, CDF delivers features that far surpass those of traditional document formats.

Live Interactive Content Any element in CDF can be transformed into interactive content easily—true interactivity, not pre-generated or scripted. With the computing power of Mathematica technology, dynamic content in CDF can be driven by real-time computation or prompt live computation for new results, which deeply immerses readers in the content.		Dynamic Math Typesetting CDF makes mathematical typesetting semantic-faithful, unlike traditional typography. In addition to publication-quality typesetting, a formula can be input in a fully typeset form and then immediately evaluated to produce typeset output that can be edited and re-evaluated. It is no wonder that Wolfram was the major force behind the MathML standard.
All-in-One Format All elements of a project—calculations, visualizations, data, code, documentation, and even interactive applications—stay together in a uniquely flexible format. That means working on a problem with CDF automatically creates a document that can deliver knowledge to readers and let them drive content live.		Integrated Computational Knowledge Powered by Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha technology, CDF brings trillions of pieces of expert-level data and the world's largest collection of algorithms together in a single platform. Authors in a wide range of fields can instantly create subject-specific content without requiring additional tools.

 

 

The Power behind CDF

CDF is built on the same technologies that are behind Mathematica—the world's leading computation platform—and Wolfram|Alpha—the world's first computational knowledge engine. Every CDF comes with the technology innovations that Wolfram has brought to the world for decades.

Automation by Design Automation is the key to productive creation. CDF technology applies intelligent automation in every part of the system, from algorithm selection to plot layouts to user interface design. You get reliable, high-quality results without needing expertise—and even if you're an expert, you get results faster.		Free-Form Linguistic Input At the core of CDF technology lies the Mathematica language, a powerful and versatile language for content creation. With free-form linguistic input, programming in the Mathematica language can be as easy as entering plain English. Type in your idea and let the system transform it—whether it is a simple plot or a complex image processing operation.
Built-in Knowledge: Algorithms CDF technology builds in specialized algorithms for many scientific and technical areas, from financial engineering to computational biology, making CDFs on almost any topic easy to create. Specialist functionality is tightly integrated with the core of CDF, providing a smooth workflow for authors and delivering unprecedented computational power to readers.		Built-in Knowledge: Computable Data With CDF, you have full access to a vast collection of computable data across hundreds of fields, from economy to life science to geography. Real-time access to frequently updated and meticulously maintained computable data makes CDF documents as live and as accurate as possible.
Integrated Graphics & Visualization CDF and its underlying Mathematica platform provide the world's most sophisticated graphics and visualization functionality by any measure. Interactive 3D graphics, complex scientific plots, expansive business charts, and automatic graph visualization—everything is fully built-in and ready to use.		Symbolic Documents With CDF technology, everything is an expression, even whole documents. That allows them to be operated on programmatically. The symbolic basis of CDFs underlies many features, from cascading stylesheets to immediate deployment of CDFs as presentations, for print or the web, and as applications.

 

Getting Started with CDF

You can create CDFs with Mathematica 8. Additional creation methods will be coming in the future, ranging from Wolfram|Alpha to on-demand online Mathematica services.

How to Get Started:

1. Watch brief videos: Creating a Knowledge App in 60 Seconds and Making Documents Interactive with CDF.
2. Download a free trial of Mathematica 8 to create your own CDFs. Comprehensive documentation is available on how to create CDFs, interactive controls, and many other topics.
3. Repurpose the source code of thousands of CDFs available from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. For example, a Demonstration's source could be as straightforward as the code shown below.

4. Want to learn more? Online CDF courses are coming soon

 

Deploying CDF

Deploy CDFs as full pages or embedded objects within a web browser, or as desktop applications or documents.

Our FreeCDF terms allow you to share your CDFs with anyone for non-commercial use. See the license summary for details.

Typical Uses of FreeCDF:

• Add calculators to your blog
• Make executive reports into interactive presentations
• Turn your lecture notes into an interactive website
• Transform your lab notebook into a slide show with dynamic computations

 

CDF Product Icons

Wolfram provides three types of web icons that you can use on your site:

CDF icons indicate that a CDF file is available for download or for using in the web browser.

Get CDF Player icons provide a convenient link to the Wolfram CDF Player download site.

Powered by Wolfram CDF icons indicate that your site uses CDF or includes a CDF application.

 

Platform Support for CDF

For Windows and Mac OS X, Wolfram CDF Player offers desktop and web plugin functionality. On Linux systems, CDF Player currently supports desktop functionality only.

The web plugin has been tested with the following browsers:

Windows 7/Vista/XP: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
Mac OS X 10.5+: Safari, Firefox, Chrome(4.0+), Opera(10.5+)
Linux 2.4+: Desktop functionality only

System requirements:
Processor: Intel Pentium III 650 MHz or equivalent
System Memory (RAM): 512 MB required; 1 GB+ recommended

CDF on Mobile Devices

We are actively pursuing solutions for mobile devices, including cloud-based services, to make CDF available to anyone, anywhere.
The iPad is an important part of our CDF strategy for accessing educational apps, business reports, and other interactive computational material.