Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

DOCUMENTS

WPF includes three different kinds of documents: flow documents, fixed documents, and XPS (XML Paper Specification) documents. These different kinds of documents provide support for high-end text and printing capabilities.

For example, fixed documents allow you to generate a document that keeps the same layout whether it is viewed on a monitor, printed at low-resolution, or printed at a very high-resolution. On each device, the document uses the features available on that device to give the best result possible.

Each of these three kinds of documents is quite complex so there isn’t room to do them justice here. However, the following three sections provide an overview and give brief examples.

Flow Documents

Flow documents are designed to display as much data as possible in the best way possible, depending on runtime constraints such as the size of the control displaying the document. If the control grows, the document rearranges its contents to take advantage of the new available space. If the control shrinks, the document again rearranges its contents to fit the available space. The effect sort of mimics the way a web browser behaves, rearranging the objects it displays as it is resized.

The WPF FlowDocument control represents a flow document. The FlowDocument can contain four basic content elements: List, Section, Paragraph, and Table. These have rather obvious purposes: to display data in a list, group data in a section, group data in a paragraph, or display data in ...