A page turn worth publishing.
Leaf is our own engine for the documents you put online. We wrote it to replace the library every flipbook used to run on. Turn the pages yourself — this is a real document, not a video.
An ordinary PDF, published as a flipbook. Drag a corner, or use the arrow keys.
What actually changed
Numbers from our own reader, on the documents customers publish. Where we have not measured something, it is not on this page.
Measured in the real reader on a throttled 4G connection, against the engine it replaces.
To read ten pages of the same document — so a long read costs your visitor less data.
On a 320-page report. The pages you are not looking at cost nothing, because they are not there.
An A3 fold-out inside an A4 report used to be squeezed into the same slot at roughly half-size type.
It holds up on whatever they open it with
Leaf draws the turning page with WebGL where the device supports it, falls back to a 2D canvas where it does not, and falls back again to a plain CSS turn on low-powered devices. Each step down happens by itself, at runtime, and the page you end up looking at is the same page either way. If a device can do none of it, the document still opens — that was a requirement, not an afterthought. The point of publishing a document on the web is that it can be read.
What we are not claiming
We set ourselves a bar: Leaf becomes the default only when it leads the field, and any public claim that it leads has to come from our own measurements. On one criterion it does not lead. The time between pressing a key and the first frame appearing is a few milliseconds longer on Leaf than on the best engine we measured against — 4 to 8 milliseconds. It is probably explicable, but explicable is not leading, so we are not going to tell you it is the most responsive engine out there. It is not, by that measurement, today.
For the documents you have already published
There is nothing to do. Every document already on Living Page works with the new engine — nothing is re-uploaded, nothing is migrated, and no link changes.
Questions
What is Leaf?
Leaf is the engine that turns the pages in a Living Page flipbook. It replaces the open-source library we used before, and we wrote it ourselves so the way a document behaves is something we can fix rather than something we inherit.
Do I need to do anything to my documents?
No. Every document you have already published works on the new engine without being re-uploaded, re-rendered or changed in any way. The page images you already have are what it reads.
Will my flipbook look different?
The page turn looks better and the reader around it has been redesigned. The pages themselves are the same pages — same images, same text, same links and videos, in the same places.
What happens on an older phone?
Leaf draws the turning page with WebGL where the device supports it, steps down to a 2D canvas where it does not, and steps down again to a plain CSS turn on low-powered devices. Each step happens by itself, and the document still opens.
Publish a document people want to turn the pages of.
Start free — every plan gets the new engine, on the documents you have already published.