CDX is the native file format of ChemDraw, and is guaranteed to save anything drawn in ChemDraw without loss of data. At the same time, however, its architecture was carefully designed to make it a flexible and general-purpose chemical format. It is intended to be a practical choice for use by non-graphical programs, i.e. ones dealing in connection tables rather than desktop publishing. Because of its ability to incorporate custom information, and because it is in the public domain, CDX has been adopted by the U.S. Patent Office as its standard chemical format. Originally developed by the CambridgeSoft Corporation, it is now a subsidiary of PerkinElmer Inc.
molecular entity molecular structure