'Tomorrow, communicating ideas without interactivity will be just as inconceivable. 'Today it's inconceivable that textbooks, financial reports, or news articles wouldn't include visuals they're too valuable to communicating the idea,' said Conrad Wolfram, Director of Strategic Development at Wolfram Research. Central to the concept are knowledge apps, interactive diagrams, or info apps-the live successors of traditional diagrams and infographics. As a result, today's content lacks interactivity to engage with-dramatically limiting readers' understanding.īy contrast, CDFs are as interactive as apps, yet as everyday as documents. Interactivity is familiar in apps, but usually requires programmers to create, rarely making it cost-effective for communicating ideas. Traditional documents are easy to author, but are limited to content that's static or can only be played back. July 21, 2011-Wolfram Research today announced the Computable Document Format (CDF), a new standard to put interactivity at the core of everyday documents and empower readers with live content they can drive. Wolfram Launches Computable Document Format (CDF): Bring Documents to Life with the Power of ComputationĪs everyday as a document, but as interactive as an app, the new standard dramatically broadens the author-reader communication pipeline In the meantime, head on over to the source to download the free player and see for yourself the possible future of live textbooks, tables and charts. We'll just have to wait and see if CDF's a more noble contender. create.' We've seen Microsoft's XPS take a similar crack at dethroning the reigning format king, only to find itself in portable document oblivion. Not a programmer? No need to worry, the company promises the two-way diagrams are 'easy enough for teachers, journalists, managers, researchers to.

Introduced today, the Computable Document Format 'puts easy-to-author interactivity at its core,' breathing animated life into otherwise static infographics. Well, Wolfram Group's got an open format contender to Adobe's throne and it's hoping you'll adopt it. Turns out, PDFs viewed in e-ink or on a tethered slate don't offer much in the way of interactive app experiences - they're still just documents, no matter the tablet they're wearing.

Amazon's Kindle DX and RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook were supposed to be the business world's answer to an on-the-go office.

Opening cdf files