A flowing back again.
Used in a Sentence
reflow
Definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, and sentence examples for reflow.
Editorial note
Zooming in without reflow, makes things bigger, but means you now have to swipe to move the viewport over the text.
Examples17
Definitions4
Parts of speech2
Quick take
A flowing back again.
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of reflow gathered in one view.
(intransitive) To flow back again; to flow once more.
(transitive, computing, wordprocessing) To modify the layout of text around other objects in a document.
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for reflow.
noun
A flowing back again.
verb
(intransitive) To flow back again; to flow once more.
verb
(transitive, computing, wordprocessing) To modify the layout of text around other objects in a document.
noun
(computing) The process of recreating the layout of a document when some of its component elements have changed.
Example sentences
Zooming in without reflow, makes things bigger, but means you now have to swipe to move the viewport over the text.
The browser is still going too do all the reflow etc.
But a designer could still do all the value-add that they currently practice, and make the text reflow.
Perhaps they want to keep the formatting, and don't want pages to reflow after they've already been layed out?
This arrangement poses a number of problems for designing rich apps, including very poor performance related to content reflow.
For curious souls, Chrome on Android sometimes supports reflow out of the box, depending on vendor.
There are, of course, competitors in the world of toaster oven sized SMD reflow ovens.
HTC is one of those who ships Chrome with reflow on zoom enabled.
Case in point: It's simply not possible to offer proper zoom support without text-reflow, at which point the page-layout oriented UI falls apart.
For interactive applications, the ability to incrementally reflow the page (say, after an element's value for the display property is changed) is crucial.
Modern browser engines have a ton of code that tries to minimize the amount of reflow performed (and sometimes loses correctness!), because it's really easy to accidentally reflow too much and fail to maintain 60fps.
Real reason websites look so ugly, not mentioned in article: browsers don't use good typesetting algorithms in order to keep reflow speeds high.
Quote examples
When we modify DOM it becomes "dirty", and after our script finishes, reflow/re-render happens.
I consider a site that does not reflow text to exhibit a similar attitude that "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" used to imply.
Twitter integration "Hey I just reflowed a SMD PCB" Clearly you can make more profit off an individual reflow oven than an individual glorified toaster oven.
Note that Chrome on Android has a "force enable zoom" setting in Accessibility panel while Opera for Android (which uses Blink engine, same as Chrome) has reflow-on-zoom support (called "text wrap" in settings).
Proper noun examples
Reflow is altogether another beast - I guess it is more useful for books with just plain text and images (lifeless).
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use reflow in a sentence?
Zooming in without reflow, makes things bigger, but means you now have to swipe to move the viewport over the text.
What does reflow mean?
A flowing back again.
What part of speech is reflow?
reflow is commonly used as noun, verb.