Safari text reflow/formatting revisited

About a year ago, I asked about problems with web pages' text formatting and/or reflow in Safari, and didn't really get an answer. The problem has gotten worse with the advent of iPhones with different screen resolutions (320x480, 640x960).
The problem is that web pages from several sites I'm working on are rendered on the iPhone by Safari in either a tiny unreadable font, or if you resize the screen, a legible font but a "window" that's much wider than the screen, requiring left-right scrolling to read. Users find this really unacceptable, of course, and want it fixed.
When I asked before, the proposed solution was "<meta name="viewport" content="width=320">" in the page's <head> section. This sorta worked, but has the problem that when you rotate the phone, you get the text in a huge font, and shrinking it is simply undone by Safari.
But we now have clients with the newer iPhones, and the above semi-solution doesn't work very well for them at all. So I'm trying to learn whether there's a solution now. Is there a way to get Safari to render web pages with the text at a font size chosen by the user, and "flowed" to fit the iPhone's screen width, whatever it is?
The weird thing here is that this is something that most browsers have done from the start. The main design goal of the original HTML over two decades ago was handling different-sized screens (or windows). The very first browsers (Mosaic, etc.) did "flowing" of the text to fit whatever size window widget they were running in. If you resize a browser's window, all the others I know of will quickly reflow the text so it's the same font size and fits the new window size.
But iPhone's Safari seems to stand alone in not doing this. It formats the text for a window much larger than the screen, and then shrinks it to fit the current width (i.e., portrait/landscape mode).
But is this actually true? Is there some way to tell Safari to do the usual sort of formatting to fit the current screen size and shape/layout? The <meta> tag doesn't do this, and has the problem that it can't know the size of the client's screen, which is no longer the same on all iPhones.
Googling turns up a lot of questions and complaints about this, but no solutions. My earlier question also stands unanswered. But it's more of a problem now, with more than one iPhone screen resolution in users' hands.
(And why does the Apple Discussions input form want to know my Macbook Pro's OS level? This is a question about iPhone software, and our web pages aren't delivered by my Macbook Pro, even if I do develop a lot of them there.

Hmmm ... So the only replies are basically "We don't know either." ;-)
Meanwhile, I've been advising friends who've asked that in reality, Safari on the iPhone isn't actually a browser. Yes, it can download files and display them, but there are zillions of programs that can do that. The primary feature of the original (Mosaic) browser 20 years ago was that it could reformat text to fit whatever size screen you had. It did this with the help of the funny new HTML markup, in which <P> indicated a new paragraph. It knew how to reformat a paragraph's text to fit the width and font size of its current window. This made it very easy to write simple text that would display readably on any screen that had a vertical scroll ability (and even the dumb terminals back in the 1980s had that). Yes, it had lots of other nice features, like the <B> and <I> tags to make text bold and/or italic. But the "reflowing" of text was the big gain in readability that really made it usable by the masses.
So the iPhone and iPad don't actually come with a browser. But I've also been getting those friends to download Opera and try it. They're all happy with it. So as long as Apple doesn't ban Opera, there is a way to get a browser on these gadgets. Maybe I should look around and see if there are others.
And maybe what I should do is change my CGI code that looks at the HTTP_USER_AGENT string, so when it finds Safari there, includes a short apology that the text is so poorly formatted. I suppose it should only do this when iPhone or iPad also appear in the string, since the Macbook and iMac versions of Safari seem to do a good job of (re)formatting text.

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Safari Browser lacks auto text reflow when zoom in

Hi All,
I love many features provided by iphone safari but compare it to Google Nexus web browser, it really makes me wish that I could use the other browser on IPhone. The reason is because when try to zoom in a webpage in safari, the text in the zoom in region does not automatically get wrapped/reflow causing reader having to scroll right and left to read the whole sentence. That is really an horribly dizzy experience, an eyesore indeed. IPhone Safari cannot be used to view many text intensive web pages. But if you try to use Google Nexus, it is heaven! When you zoom in the page, it not only makes the text size visually bigger BUT ALSO auto wrapped/reflow the entire article so that all text of the article are viewable within phone screen without having to scroll left and right.
I just desperately want to know if there is any third party browser who can do what Nexus browser is doing - text reflow/wrap upon zoom in? Is Safari going to release some similar feature soon? Please let me know if you have any clue.
Thanks

What kind of garbage answer is that? If I spend my money on a device, I don't have the right to voice my opinion about enhancements? So what you believe is that the consumer has no voice. Spend your money, then shut up. I'm sorry but it's not that cut and dry. I love my iPhone. I also love text wrap. But I don't want an Android phone. I'm very glad that the techs at Apple support weren't as rude as you. They were very understanding, very helpful, told me to email Steve Jobs, and even tried to find applications that had a possible text reflowing browser. Finding nothing, they apologized and told me that my request was valid, and encouraged me to continue asking. Please don't ever get a job at Apple. You would be a horrible customer service representative.

CS5 hangs with smart text reflow during scripting

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My assumption is, that the smart text reflow does run some sort of asyncronous and gets in the way of saving/exporting to pdf the file. A "$.sleep(5000);" after opening/placing does not help either.
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Well.. it works. It's a ugly cludge, but at least it works. I'm posting a snippet of code, because i'we seen a lot of threads on the same subject, and maby someone else will find it usefull.
// save old recompose and set new one
      var myOldSmartText = app.activeDocument.textPreferences.smartTextReflow;
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      app.activeDocument.textPreferences.addPages = AddPageOptions.END_OF_STORY;
      app.activeDocument.textPreferences.deleteEmptyPages = true;
      //find docType headers and apply keep
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/* long code to process tables, not interesting
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/* long code to preformat text, add/remove space after headings, lists, blocks etc.
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      //now check if story overflows? (maby you have a very large cell in a table? some wierd keep options? bad things happen
Can i mark my own answer as correct?

Does reader for iOS support text reflow?

I have a number of tagged PDFs that I created using Acrobat on a Windows machine, and transferred them to my iPhone. Does Reader on iOS support text reflow so that I can increase the font and read my document? The only option I see is to zoom in, but since it maintains the full page formatting, I then need to "move around" the page to actually read the text. Looking at the full page, the text is too small.
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[Android]why can't "text reflow" be fixed instead of using the unreliable broken "text inflation"?

text inflation as a desktop-to-mobile-view conversion doesn't work, and can never be fixed.
it will always either fail to make important parts of websites readable, or completely unhinge them.
opera mini, opera mobile(now classic) and opera for android show how well "text reflow" works for desktop pages on mobile devices.
before the opera mobile EOL I never needed mobile versions of pages.
firefox for android already has a text reflow feature, but it is hidden away and unusable because of 2 easily fixable problems.
1. "text inflation", it's completely unnecessary to require enlarged text in order to reflow but with this feature disabled(text to smallest size) there is no reflow.
2. "fixed zoom", currently double-tap zooming will always put the text fullscreen(which on a desktop layout is still too small)
a "fixed zoom" option that always zooms a set % regardless of where you double-tap should allow zooming in to a level where text is readable and should force "text reflow" to reflow text to screen-width.
so why are we still stuck with either messy or unreadable text on desktop pages?

you seem to have missed the point of my post.
firefox has 2 methods to make desktop pages readable on phones, "text reflow" and "text inflation".
text reflow is disabled by default and doesn't work properly because of a few unchangeable settings, even though it is proven to be a very effective and reliable method to make desktop pages work on phones by opera's browsers.
and text inflation is broken because it can never accurately determine what can and can't be inflated.
and my question is why we're still stuck with using text inflation when text reflow is a much better option?

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Safari text reflow/formatting revisited

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