Text reflow vs. Page layout based

[Randy]

I was doing some reading on MS Word and the article indicated that it was
text reflow software, not page layout based. Can someone provide some
definition and insight into what that means? Hope this isn't to much of a
basic question.

Thanks.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In Word, when you create a document, you start typing in the document body.
As you continue typing and fill a page, your text automatically continues to
the next page. If you add text in the middle of what you've typed,
everything below spills over to following pages as needed. The entire
document is a continuous text stream. You can insert text boxes and graphics
and wrap text around them, but every such object on a page is anchored to
the text and will move with it; you can't anchor it to a specific page.

In Publisher, on the other hand, you can't type text until you have inserted
a text box on the page. When that text box is full, you have to create a new
text box (on the next page, for example). You can link the text boxes so
that text flows back and forth between them almost the way it does in Word,
but you also have the option of containing text and other page elements on a
single page. You can add, remove, and rearrange some pages without
disturbing others because they're not integrally connected the way pages in
Word are.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I was doing some reading on MS Word and the article indicated that it was
text reflow software, not page layout based. Can someone provide some
definition and insight into what that means? Hope this isn't to much of a
basic question.

Thanks.

In a program such as Publisher, which is page layout software, the "page" exists
as an independent container. You can put a text box or a graphic in a particular
place on a particular page, and it stays there.

In Word, text boxes and graphics and other objects are "anchored" to a
particular paragraph. If that paragraph moves because you edited the text, the
text box or graphic moves, too. There is no page "container" independent of the
text; page contents are continually recalculated based on the contents and what
information the printer driver supplies.

That's the essential difference. There are exceptions -- for example, you can
tell Word to keep an object at a particular location on the page; but if the
anchor paragraph moves to another page, the object will also move to the other
page. An object cannot be anchored to a paragraph that isn't on the same page.
Another consequence of this is that in Word you can't put an object on a page
that doesn't contain a text paragraph, and you can't "flow" text around a
full-page picture. In a page layout program you can do that.