Reflowable document

A reflowable document is a type of electronic document that can adapt its presentation to the output device. Typical desktop publishing (DTP) output formats like PostScript or PDF are page-oriented, so are not generally reflowable (but see discussion below for PDF), whereas the world wide web standard, HTML is a reflowable format.^[1]

The notion of reflow is sometimes used to discuss only more advanced typographic features than HTML offers, which are typically present in typesetting or DTP publications, for example automatically balancing the amount of text in a number of columns.^[2]

Examples

Besides HTML, commercially available systems include:

• ePUB is a simple reflowable format that allows a single column with inline images, in many ways similar to a stripped-down HTML.^[3]
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) introduced XAML-based documents together with a viewer call "SinglePageViewer" that can reflow any WPF objects. However the XPS document standard also introduced by Microsoft with WPF does not support reflow.^[2]
• Tagged PDF documents can contain an additional data layer which (among other things) allows for the content to be reflowed within the boundaries of one original page.^[4][5]
• FictionBook is a free reflowable format by design. It does not specify the appearance of a document; instead, it describes its structure. For example, there are special tags for epigraphs, verses and quotations.

Xerox PARC has developed an experimental systems that allows the reflow of any document using OCR layout analysis at word-level.^[1]

References

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