THE AIDF FORMAT

A document that opens itself.

An .aidf file is a document with its own reader built in. You don’t install anything to read one — the file itself opens in any browser, on any device, with no internet connection. Made by CloudMount.

It opens itself

An .aidf carries its own reader. Double-click it and it opens in whatever browser you already have — Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Linux. There is no app to install, ever.

It never needs a connection

Everything the document needs — text, images, video, 3D models, fonts — travels inside the file. It works on a plane, at a job site, in a basement.

It never asks

A genuine .aidf shows no pop-ups, requests no permissions, and has no "enable content" button. It cannot read your files, install anything, or collect anything. If a document that looks like one ever asks — close it.

It stays small

The same document that weighs 266KB as a PDF ships at 90KB as an .aidf — with the reader riding inside. Modern image and video encoding, measured for visual quality, not guessed.

It can prove who made it

Signed files name their publisher. Drop one on the CloudMount viewer: it checks the signature against the publisher's key and every fingerprint inside, so you know who made it and that nothing changed.

It does more than paper

Slides you can swipe, video that plays on tap, 3D you can orbit, a website preview, even a product catalog with a cart. A print-quality version can ride inside, and when you need paper the CloudMount viewer exports a PDF: every picture becomes a page, at full size.

How to open an .aidf file

  1. Double-click it. It opens in your browser like any web page — because the file is its own reader.
  2. If your computer doesn’t know where to send it yet, rename it to end in .aidf.html and double-click again — same file, same result.
  3. Or drop it on the CloudMount viewer, which checks that nothing was altered, names the publisher of a signed file, and exports a PDF.
  4. If you installed our app from Chrome or Edge on a computer, it opens .aidf files too.

Curious what’s inside? Every .aidf is also a standard ZIP archive — rename a copy to .zip and look. A manifest, the content, and nothing hidden. That transparency is part of the design.

For developers

The specification is open: github.com/CloudMountain-Luke/aidf-spec. Media type application/x-aidf (vendor-tree registration in progress), extension .aidf, identifiable by the marker<!--AIDF/1 len= or the ZIP’s first entry, a storedmimetype file. Readers are forbidden from network access, payload content is data — never code — and static rendering is the normative rendering. The spec says all of this with MUSTs.

Documents are made with CloudEasel’s RingMaster studio. If you received an .aidf from us or a CloudMount client, the viewer checks every fingerprint in it and, when it is signed, names its publisher.