Documents in WPF This is a document marked up in XAML and displayed by WPF using vector-based graphics and hardware acceleration. There are two types of document in WPF. The flow document and the fixed document . This is a flow document in that its content flows as the space around it changes in order to achieve the best layout for the reader including pagination and "column-ation" and taking account of ideas such as not giving the user a line of text to read that is so wide as to cause them to have to turn their head when working on a high-res monitor. We can include content such as lists Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 Item 5 and tables Table Header Column 1 Column 2 Value 1 Value 2 Value 3 Value 4 The flow document also supports the idea of content that is related to other content such as the picture below which might need to be kept near to a particular piece of text so as to make sense. For instance, this piece of text has been told to keep itself with the next image as much as is possible. The controls at the bottom of this area (find, page-display-mode and zoom) are all provided for free by the FlowDocumentReader that is displaying the content. The document also supports the idea of annotations which can be ink or test based and is a service provided free by the infrastructure but I can't demonstrate this here as we're doing everything in pure-XAML and (I don't think) you can do annotations without a little bit of code. By contrast, a fixed-document is more suited to documents such as legal documents where the layout needs to be precisely specified in order to comply with regulations.