![]() Wolfram is correct in assuming that this kind of interactive document is important, and something we will increasingly take for granted in the era of the Web, eBooks and tablets. Other examples are statistical analysis and business intelligence, textbooks and course books where students can interact with equations and simulations, business proposals where you want to show how financial projections change based on different assumptions, or even general news reports where instead of a static chart you might want to show interactive graphics that let readers drill down into the data that interests them, or see real-time results.Īlong with the computation engine, CDF supports a decent range of traditional content formatting features including cascading stylesheets. This works better as an interactive chart where you can enter whatever values you like. We have all seen those documents with a series of projections based on different assumptions about retirement age, contributions, investment growth and so on. It is for documents where there is value in performing calculations or interacting with data within the page. There is also a browser plug-in for embedding CDF documents into web pages. The CDF player is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. A CDF document can also be compiled into a standalone executable, blurring the distinction between document and application. If you charge for your document, or want to display it without the player chrome, then a paid licence is needed. ![]() The CDF player is free, though there are some limitations. The announcement then is really about a new player for Mathematica content and applications, to broaden their usage. The authoring tool for CDF is Mathematica: There is a close relationship between CDF and Mathematica, Wollfram’s tool for creating mathematical calculations and simulations. That said, the technology here is not really new. “It’s a new way to communicate the world’s quantitative ideas much more richly than we have in the past, and in doing that a new kind of active document,” says Conrad Wolfram, Strategic Director of Wolfram Research. Wolfram has announced the Computable Document Format (CDF), a document format that enables live computation to be embedded within it.
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