Creating WPF Text Layouts is Hard

I’ve heard many people ask for advice on creating attractive text layouts using WPF – with good reason! There are quite a few challenges, in my opinion, the top difficulties are:

1. Differences from HTML/CSS: More than any other part of WPF, the System.Windows.Documents namespace has many similarities with HTML/CSS – but the differences are significant enough to cause real issues.
2. Lack of good examples: The technology is still new, so there aren’t many role-models out there to learn from. The lack of view-source capability makes it tough to steal learn from others.
3. Variable-column layout is hard: Without a doubt, designing a document that looks good when reflowed into a variable-number of columns is difficult.
4. Lack of a designer: This is a tough one.

It’s a bit ambitious, but I’m going to do what I can to help fix these problems.

Obviously, this will take many entries – let me know if I’m missing anything, or if you have specific questions you’d like me to address.